Product Description

At the height of WWI, history's most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease. Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research and now revised to reflect the growing danger of the avian flu, "The Great Influenza" is ultimately a tale of triumph amid tragedy, which provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon. John M Barry has written a new afterword for this edition that brings us up to speed on the terrible threat of the avian flu and suggests ways in which we might head off another flu pandemic.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #133074 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-07
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.19" h x 5.46" w x 8.50" l, 1.15 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 576 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In 1918, a plague swept across the world virtually without warning, killing healthy young adults as well as vulnerable infants and the elderly. Hospitals and morgues were quickly overwhelmed; in Philadelphia, 4,597 people died in one week alone and bodies piled up on the streets to be carted off to mass graves. But this was not the dreaded Black Death-it was "only influenza." In this sweeping history, Barry (Rising Tide) explores how the deadly confluence of biology (a swiftly mutating flu virus that can pass between animals and humans) and politics (President Wilson's all-out war effort in WWI) created conditions in which the virus thrived, killing more than 50 million worldwide and perhaps as many as 100 million in just a year. Overcrowded military camps and wide-ranging troop deployments allowed the highly contagious flu to spread quickly; transport ships became "floating caskets." Yet the U.S. government refused to shift priorities away from the war and, in effect, ignored the crisis. Shortages of doctors and nurses hurt military and civilian populations alike, and the ineptitude of public health officials exacerbated the death toll. In Philadelphia, the hardest-hit municipality in the U.S., "the entire city government had done nothing" to either contain the disease or assist afflicted families. Instead, official lies and misinformation, Barry argues, created a climate of "fear... [that] threatened to break the society apart." Barry captures the sense of panic and despair that overwhelmed stricken communities and hits hard at those who failed to use their power to protect the public good. He also describes the work of the dedicated researchers who rushed to find the cause of the disease and create vaccines. Flu shots are widely available today because of their heroic efforts, yet we remain vulnerable to a virus that can mutate to a deadly strain without warning. Society's ability to survive another devastating flu pandemic, Barry argues, is as much a political question as a medical one.
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From AudioFile
Scott Brick would make a fine lecturer. John M. Barry's book about the great influenza epidemic of 1918, which killed up to 100 million worldwide, is also a history of the practice of medicine. Brick's steady voice perfectly details the state of medical research in the 1800s, underlining the point that it was nonexistent. He allows a slight tinge of incredulity in his voice when he relates that doctors simply did what they had always done, never questioning their practices. When Brick gets to the epidemic itself, which started out of sheer greed and the stupidity of the government in Philadelphia, the listener is ready for it. Be prepared to be horrified. M.S. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Late in this history of the 1918 influenza pandemic, Barry observes that the event "has survived in memory more than in any literature." Apparently, people would rather not record horrors that make them feel insignificant. Fortunately, there are deep-digging historians. Barry presents the pandemic as the first great challenge to the modern American medical establishment, whose response, although it was overwhelmed, demonstrated what medical science applied to public health practice might do, and as a test of national, state, and municipal political responsiveness to domestic crisis. Medicine, though far too lightly equipped, rose to the occasion, but politicians, from President Wilson on down, refused to acknowledge any crisis except the war in Europe and thwarted medicine's best preventive efforts. To portray the forces that met the crisis, Barry first tells the story of scientific medicine in America, begun by the shaping of Johns Hopkins Hospital and University under William Welch into the model for all other U.S. physicians' training and medical research institutions. The researchers who directly engaged the great flu were Welch proteges, and though they failed at the time, the continued research of one culminated in discovering the significance of DNA. Meanwhile, the death and panic, national and worldwide--the flu most probably started in Kansas, and troop movements that the army continued against its surgeon general's advice spread it cross-country and to Europe--were appalling. For readers, however, they are the somber underscoring of an enthralling symphony of a book, whose every page compels attention. Ray Olson
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