Summary:
John Barry’s The Great Influenza is a deep dive into
the history of the influenza pandemic of 1918.
But it is not simply a deep dive into the purely medical aspects of that
history—as no medical histories truly are—but is in addition an exploration of
the social and political currents of the time that coexisted with and
facilitated the pandemic.
Although his story opens with the establishment of the Johns
Hopkins Hospital in 1876, Barry immediately takes a detour into the history of
medicine dating back to Hippocrates, and traces the history of
medical/scientific thought from Ancient Greece to the end of the 19th
century. He then introduces a series of
physicians, scientists, and medical researchers who will play their parts in
the story of the pandemic (this first section is called “The Warriors”) and
outlines their training, research, and interactions.
It isn’t until page 91 that he takes us to the rural Kansas
county in which the story of the pandemic begins. For although it was called the “Spanish Flu,”
that was actually an eponym of convenience; in fact, the first cases of
pandemic flu seem to have arisen on the American prairie. However, newspaper reporting on the new
pandemic was felt by the Allies and Central Powers alike to be contrary to the
public interest (the war was still raging), so it was left to neutral Spain,
whose king had come down with the disease, to publish the early reports. In this section, “The Swarm”, Barry also briefly
reviews the basic (not to worry, very basic) microbiology of viruses and the
history of some prior pandemics. He
follows this with the section called “The Tinderbox,” in which he traces the
events leading up to the entry of the United States into World War I, and the
importance of that war and the political and social conditions surrounding it
in the history of the pandemic. From
here on in the influenza itself takes center stage; in sections called “It
Begins,” “Explosion,” “Pestilence,” “The Race,” and “The Tolling of the Bell,”
the rapid and lethal course of the pandemic is described in gripping (no pun
intended) detail. The last two sections
discuss the scientific advances (and some false starts) brought about by the
cadre of researchers working day and night to tame the outbreak, and then Barry
finally turns to the retreat of the virus and ultimate end of the pandemic. The book ends as it began, returning to the
stories of the individual men and women of science who engaged in the battle to
beat the disease of which it had initially been said by many that “[t]his was,
after all, only influenza.”
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