Influenza 1918 Quotes

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Shut your eyes,” said Miss Tanner. “Oh no,” said Miranda, “for then I see worse things…
Katherine Anne Porter (Pale Horse, Pale Rider)
So the final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that those who occupy positions of authority must lessen the panic that can alienate all within a society. Society cannot function if it is every man for himself. By definition, civilization cannot survive that. Those in authority must retain the public’s trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best. A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete. Only then will people be able to break it apart.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
Throughout the pandemic, the nation lacked a uniform policy about gathering places, and there was no central authority with the power to make and enforce rules that everyone had to obey. Each community acted on its own, doing as its elected officials thought best.12
Albert Marrin (Very, Very, Very Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918)
The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed more people than the First World War—an estimated 3 to 6 per cent of the human race.
Emma Donoghue (The Pull of the Stars)
When the next pandemic comes, as it surely will someday, perhaps we will be ready to meet it. If we are not, the outcome will be very, very, very dreadful.
Albert Marrin (Very, Very, Very Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918)
The Spanish Influenza did not originate in Spain. In fact the first recorded case was in the United States, in Kansas, on March 9th, 1918. Beware the Ides of March. But because Spain was neutral in World War I, it did not sensor reports of the disease to the public. To tell the truth then, is to risk being remembered by its fiction. Countless countries laid blame to one another. What the US called the Spanish Influenza, Spain called the French Flu, or the Naples Soldier. What Germans dubbed the Russian Pest, the Russians called Chinese Flu.
Amanda Gorman (Call Us What We Carry: Poems)
However, as bad as things were, the worst was yet to come, for germs would kill more people than bullets. By the time that last fever broke and the last quarantine sign came down, the world had lost 3-5% of its population.
Charles River Editors (The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic: The History and Legacy of the World’s Deadliest Influenza Outbreak)
Ebola is a zoonosis. So is bubonic plague. So was the so-called Spanish influenza of 1918–1919, which had its ultimate source in a wild aquatic bird and, after passing through some combination of domesticated animals (a duck in southern China, a sow in Iowa?) emerged to kill as many as 50 million people before receding into obscurity.
David Quammen (Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic)
No other disease, no war, no natural disaster, no famine comes close to the great pandemic. In the space of eighteen months in 1918–1919, about 500 million people, one-third of the human race at the time, came down with influenza. The exact total of lives lost will never be known. An early estimate, made in 1920, claimed 21.5 million died worldwide. Since then, researchers have been continually raising the number as they find new information. Today, the best estimate of flu deaths in 1918–1919 is between 50 million and 100 million worldwide, and probably closer to the latter figure. 7
Albert Marrin (Very, Very, Very Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918)
White Christians often explained the disaster in a time-honored way: it was God's punishment of humanity for its sings. To the seven deadly sins--anger, greed, lust, envy, pride, laziness, gluttony--they added an eighth sin: 'worshiping science.
Albert Marrin (Very, Very, Very Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918)
overstate to make a point—warned, civilization could have disappeared within a few more weeks. So the final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that those who occupy positions of authority must lessen the panic that can alienate all within a society. Society cannot function if it is every man for himself. By definition, civilization cannot survive that. Those in authority must retain the public’s trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best. A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete. Only then will people be able to break it apart.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
In the United States, influenza death rates were so high that the average life span fell by twelve years, from fifty-one in 1917 to thirty-nine in 1918. If you were a “doughboy”—slang for an American soldier—you had a better chance of dying in bed from flu or flu-related complications than from enemy action.
Albert Marrin (Very, Very, Very Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918)
Edward Jenner’s discovery of vaccination drew harsh criticism from the pulpit. Clergymen denounced the doctor for having put himself above God. Only the Almighty, they said, sends illness and only the Almighty cures it. Vaccination, critics charged, was “a diabolical operation,” and its inventor was “flying in the face of Providence
Albert Marrin (Very, Very, Very Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918)
The 1918 epidemic came in two waves, a mild flu in the spring of 1918 followed by the killer flu in the fall.
Gina Kolata (Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It)
Influenza had brought the all-conquering German army to its knees, while the Allies, stricken too, took advantage of their enemy’s weakness to regroup.
Catharine Arnold (Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History)
the disturbing possibility that the Spanish Lady might stage a return visit,
Catharine Arnold (Pandemic 1918: The Story of the Deadliest Influenza in History)
With influenza and many other diseases the order is reversed, high infectivity preceding symptoms by a matter of days. A perverse pattern: the danger, then the warning. That probably helped account for the scale of worldwide misery and death during the 1918–1919 influenza: high infectivity among cases before they experienced the most obvious and debilitating stages of illness.
David Quammen (Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic)
Nowadays, the disease claims, on average, 36,000 Americans each year, out of a population of 320 million. Contrast this with another number: 35,092 Americans died in motor vehicle accidents in 2015.
Albert Marrin (Very, Very, Very Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918)
For the influenza pandemic that erupted in 1918 was the first great collision between nature and modern science. It was the first great collision between a natural force and a society that included individuals who refused either to submit to that force or to simply call upon divine intervention to save themselves from it, individuals who instead were determined to confront this force directly, with a developing technology and with their minds.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
Should we add the 40 to 50 million victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic to the 15 million who were killed in World War I, because the flu virus would not have evolved its virulence if the war hadn’t packed so many troops into trenches?
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
THE ACTUAL WORD ‘influenza’ dates from around 1500, when the Italians introduced the term for diseases that they attributed to the ‘influence’ of the stars. Another possible origin was the Italian phrase influenza di freddo, the influence of the cold.
Catharine Arnold (Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History)
Most parents thought they were being good parents. They learned from their parents or their grandparents, many of whom were severely traumatized and emotionally disconnected coming out of the devastation of a 1918 influenza pandemic and two world wars.
Tara Bianca (The Flower of Heaven: Opening the Divine Heart Through Conscious Friendship & Love Activism)
The CDC and three other research groups submitted a paper for publication in the journal Science detailing how they had reconstructed the 1918 H1N1 influenza virus, using virus genes that had been identified in lung samples of patients who died during the 1918 pandemic.
Michael T. Osterholm (Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs)
In many ways, it is hard for modern people living in First World countries to conceive of a pandemic sweeping around the world and killing millions of people, and it is even harder to believe that something as common as influenza could cause such widespread illness and death.
Charles River Editors (The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic: The History and Legacy of the World’s Deadliest Influenza Outbreak)
At least etymologically speaking, when we talk about influenza we are talking about the influences that shape the world everywhere at once. Today’s bird flu or swine flu viruses or the 1918 Spanish flu virus are not the real influenza — not the underlying influence — but only its symptom.
Jonathan Safran Foer (Eating Animals)
But as the program got going, the smallest details became issues, even the very name of the disease. Pig farmers complained to the Centers for Disease Control that the name “swine flu” might frighten people away from eating pork. They asked, to no avail, that the flu’s name be changed to “New Jersey
Gina Kolata (Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It)
in a letter to the New York Times, Dr. Hans Neumann from the New Haven Department of Health noted that based on the projected scale of the immunizations, within two days of getting a flu shot, about 2,300 people would have a stroke and 7,000 would have a heart attack. “Why?” he asked. “Because that is the number statistically expected, flu shots or no flu shots.” Likewise, in the week following a flu vaccine, another 9,000 people would contract pneumonia, of whom 900 would die. These would certainly occur after a flu shot, but not as a consequence of it. “Yet,” wrote Neumann, “can one expect a person who received a flu shot at noon and who that same night had a stroke not to associate somehow the two in his mind?” Grandma got the flu vaccine in the morning, and she was dead in the afternoon. Although association does not equal causation, this thinking could lead to a public backlash against vaccinations that would threaten future programs.
Jeremy Brown (Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic)
Flu pandemics are nothing new. Medical historians think the first one struck in 1510, infecting Asia, Africa, Europe, and the New World. Between the years 1700 and 1900, there were at least sixteen pandemics, some of them killing up to one million people. Yet these were tame compared to the 1918 calamity. It was by far the worst thing that has ever happened to humankind; not even the Black Death of the Middle Ages comes close in the number of lives it took. A 1994 report by the World Health Organization pulled no punches. The 1918 pandemic, it said, “killed more people in less time than any other disease before or since.” It was the “most deadly disease event in the history of humanity.
Albert Marrin (Very, Very, Very Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918)
relationship with nature, modern humanity has generally been the aggressor, and a daring one at that, altering the flow of rivers, building upon geological faults, and, today, even engineering the genes of existing species. Nature has generally been languid in its response, although contentious once aroused and occasionally displaying a flair for violence. By 1918 humankind was fully modern, and fully scientific, but too busy fighting itself to aggress against nature. Nature, however, chooses its own moments. It chose this moment to aggress against man, and it did not do so prodding languidly. For the first time, modern humanity, a humanity practicing the modern scientific method, would confront nature in its fullest rage.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
In the earlier tradition from which Mrs. Post wrote, the act of dying had not yet been professionalized. It did not typically involve hospitals. Women died in childbirth. Children died of fevers. Cancer was untreatable. At the time she undertook her book of etiquette, there would have been few American households untouched by the influenza pandemic of 1918. Death was up close, at home.
Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking)
For propagandists, whatever promoted the Allied cause was true, whether factual or not. What counted was the noble end--victory--not the sordid means of achieving it. 'Truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms,' declared a CPI official. 'There is nothing in experience to tell us that one is always preferable to the other....There are lifeless truths and vital lies....The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little if it is true or false.
Albert Marrin (Very, Very, Very Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918)
least 40 million people died as a result of the epidemic, the majority of them suffocated by a lethal accumulation of blood and other fluid in the lungs. Ironically, unlike most flu epidemics, but like the war that preceded and spread it, the influenza of 1918 disproportionately killed young adults. One in every hundred American males between the ages of 25 and 34 fell victim to the ‘Spanish Lady’. Strikingly, the global peak of mortality was in October and November 1918.
Niall Ferguson (The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West)
In 1918 fear moved ahead of the virus like the bow wave before a ship. Fear drove the people, and the government and the press could not control it. They could not control it because every true report had been diluted with lies. And the more the officials and newspapers reassured, the more they said, There is no cause for alarm if proper precautions are taken, or Influenza is nothing more or less than old-fashioned grippe, the more people believed themselves cast adrift, adrift with no one to trust, adrift on an ocean of death.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
Today, we share no fewer than 300 diseases with domesticated animals. For example, humans get 45 diseases from cattle, including tuberculosis; 46 from sheep and goats; 42 from pigs; 35 from horses, including the common cold; and 26 from poultry. Rats and mice carry 33 diseases to humans, including bubonic plague. Sixty-five diseases, including measles, originated in man’s best friend, the dog. We can still get parasitic worms from pet dogs and cats. That is why it is not a good idea to kiss a pet on the mouth or sleep with it in bed.4
Albert Marrin (Very, Very, Very Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918)
The new collectives that farming supported gave rise to new diseases–the so-called ‘crowd diseases’ such as measles, smallpox, tuberculosis and influenza. Humans had always been susceptible to infectious disease–leprosy and malaria were causing misery long before the farming revolution–but these were adapted to surviving in small, dispersed human populations. Among their tricks for doing so were not conferring total immunity on a recovered host, so that he or she could be infected again, and retreating to another host–a so-called ‘animal reservoir’–when humans were scarce. Both strategies helped ensure that they maintained a sufficiently large pool of susceptible hosts.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
the Spanish press doesn’t have the same censorship that the French, German, and British governments have imposed on their newspapers.” “Correct again, Lilly,” said Noble. “You can add American government censorship of the press, also. As far as I can see, in A.I. Office communications regarding The War, there is no Spanish press censorship at all. There was even wide press coverage in the last week of Spanish King Alphonse XIII and his family’s serious illnesses with the grippe.” “Both the Allies and the Central Powers don’t want to let on there has been any reduction in fighting capacity. So, very little appears in their respective newspapers. The Spanish, however, are free to report all the various details of the influenza epidemic. It would be simple wrong to conclude the epidemic is ‘Spanish’ in origin.
David Cornish (1918)
Since the body does a better job of fighting infection when it is a few degrees hotter, might reducing the fever lead to a worse outcome for the patient? A group from McMaster University in Canada looked at what happens in a large group of people when some of them—infected with, say, influenza—take medicine to reduce their fever. Once they feel better, patients with the flu get out of bed and start to socialize, spreading the virus. On a population level the effect is rather drastic. The McMaster group concluded that the practice of frequently treating fevers with medication enhances the transmission of influenza by at least 1 percent. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but remember that as many as 49,000 people die from the flu each year in the United States. If you plug the McMaster estimates into these flu numbers, almost 500 deaths per year in the U.S. (and perhaps many more elsewhere) could be prevented by avoiding fever medication during the treatment of influenza.
Jeremy Brown (Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic)
Bells Screamed all off key, wrangling together as they collided in midair, horns and whistles mingled shrilly with cries of human distress; sulphur-colored light ex-ploded through the black windowpane and flashed away in darkness. Miranda waking from a dreamless sleep asked without expecting an answer, “What is happening?” for there was a bustle of voices and footsteps in the corridor, and a sharpness in the air; the far clamour went on, a furious exasperated shrieking like a mob in revolt. The light came on, and Miss Tanner said in a furry voice, “Hear that? They’re celebrating . It’s the Armistice. The war is over, my dear.” Her hands trembled. She rattled a spoon in a cup, stopped to listen, held the cup out to Miranda. From the ward for old bedridden women down the hall floated a ragged chorus of cracked voices singing, “My country, ’tis of thee…” Sweet land… oh terrible land of this bitter world where the sound of rejoicing was a clamour of pain, where ragged tuneless old women, sitting up waiting for their evening bowl of cocoa, were singing, “Sweet land of Liberty-” “Oh, say, can you see?” their hopeless voices were asking next, the hammer strokes of metal tongues drowning them out. “The war is over,” said Miss Tanner, her underlap held firmly, her eyes blurred. Miranda said, “Please open the window, please, I smell death in here.
Katherine Anne Porter (Pale Horse, Pale Rider)
Today, such studies are illegal. Medical scientists cannot offer inducements like pardons to persuade prisoners to take part in their studies. Although they can award small cash payments to research subjects, they are forbidden from giving anyone so much money or such tempting favors that their compensations might constitute what ethicists term an inappropriate inducement, an irresistible temptation to join the study. Now, more than eighty years after the 1918 flu, people enter studies for several reasons—to get free medical care, to get an experimental drug that, they hope, might cure them of a disease like cancer or AIDS, or to help further scientific knowledge. In theory at least, study participants are supposed to be true volunteers, taking part in research of their own free will. But in 1918, such ethical arguments were rarely considered. Instead, the justification for a risky study with human beings was that it was better to subject a few to a great danger in order to save the many. Prisoners were thought to be the ideal study subjects. They could offer up their bodies for science and, if they survived, their pardons could be justified because they gave something back to society. The Navy inmates were perfect for another reason. Thirty-nine of them had never had influenza, as far as anyone knew. So they might be uniquely susceptible to the disease. If the doctors wanted to deliberately transmit the 1918 flu, what better subjects? Was influenza really so easily transmitted? the doctors asked. Why did some people get it and others not? Why did it kill the young and healthy? Could the wartime disruptions and movements of troops explain the spread of the flu? If it was as contagious as it seemed, how was it being spread? What kind of microorganism was causing the illness? The normal way to try to answer such questions would be to study the spread of the disease in animals. Give the disease to a few cages of laboratory rats, or perhaps to some white rabbits. Isolate whatever was causing the illness. Show how it spread and test ways to protect animals—and people—against the disease. But influenza, it seemed, was a uniquely human disease. No animal was known to be susceptible to it. Medical researchers felt they had no choice but to study influenza in people. Either the Navy doctors were uncommonly persuasive or the enticement of a pardon was overwhelmingly compelling. For whatever reason, the sixty-two men agreed to be subjects in the medical experiment. And so the study began. First the sailors were transferred to a quarantine station on Gallops Island in Boston Harbor. Then the Navy doctors did their best to give the men the flu. Influenza is a respiratory disease—it is spread from person to person, presumably carried on droplets of mucus sprayed in the air when sick people cough or sneeze, or carried on their hands and spread when the sick touch the healthy. Whatever was causing the flu should be present in mucus taken from the ill. The experiments, then, were straightforward. The Navy doctors collected mucus from men who were desperately ill with the flu, gathering thick viscous secretions from their noses and throats. They sprayed mucus from flu patients into the noses and throats of some men, and dropped it into other men’s eyes. In one attempt, they swabbed mucus from the back of the nose of a man with the flu and then directly swabbed that mucus into the back of a volunteer’s nose.
Gina Kolata (Flu: The Story Of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It)
Early on it is clear that Addie has a rebellious streak, joining the library group and running away to Rockport Lodge. Is Addie right to disobey her parents? Where does she get her courage? 2. Addie’s mother refuses to see Celia’s death as anything but an accident, and Addie comments that “whenever I heard my mother’s version of what happened, I felt sick to my stomach.” Did Celia commit suicide? How might the guilt that Addie feels differ from the guilt her mother feels? 3. When Addie tries on pants for the first time, she feels emotionally as well as physically liberated, and confesses that she would like to go to college (page 108). How does the social significance of clothing and hairstyle differ for Addie, Gussie, and Filomena in the book? 4. Diamant fills her narrative with a number of historical events and figures, from the psychological effects of World War I and the pandemic outbreak of influenza in 1918 to child labor laws to the cultural impact of Betty Friedan. How do real-life people and events affect how we read Addie’s fictional story? 5. Gussie is one of the most forward-thinking characters in the novel; however, despite her law degree she has trouble finding a job as an attorney because “no one would hire a lady lawyer.” What other limitations do Addie and her friends face in the workforce? What limitations do women and minorities face today? 6. After distancing herself from Ernie when he suffers a nervous episode brought on by combat stress, Addie sees a community of war veterans come forward to assist him (page 155). What does the remorse that Addie later feels suggest about the challenges American soldiers face as they reintegrate into society? Do you think soldiers today face similar challenges? 7. Addie notices that the Rockport locals seem related to one another, and the cook Mrs. Morse confides in her sister that, although she is usually suspicious of immigrant boarders, “some of them are nicer than Americans.” How does tolerance of the immigrant population vary between city and town in the novel? For whom might Mrs. Morse reserve the term Americans? 8. Addie is initially drawn to Tessa Thorndike because she is a Boston Brahmin who isn’t afraid to poke fun at her own class on the women’s page of the newspaper. What strengths and weaknesses does Tessa’s character represent for educated women of the time? How does Addie’s description of Tessa bring her reliability into question? 9. Addie’s parents frequently admonish her for being ungrateful, but Addie feels she has earned her freedom to move into a boardinghouse when her parents move to Roxbury, in part because she contributed to the family income (page 185). How does the Baum family’s move to Roxbury show the ways Betty and Addie think differently from their parents about household roles? Why does their father take such offense at Herman Levine’s offer to house the family? 10. The last meaningful conversation between Addie and her mother turns out to be an apology her mother meant for Celia, and for a moment during her mother’s funeral Addie thinks, “She won’t be able to make me feel like there’s something wrong with me anymore.” Does Addie find any closure from her mother’s death? 11. Filomena draws a distinction between love and marriage when she spends time catching up with Addie before her wedding, but Addie disagrees with the assertion that “you only get one great love in a lifetime.” In what ways do the different romantic experiences of each woman inform the ideas each has about love? 12. Filomena and Addie share a deep friendship. Addie tells Ada that “sometimes friends grow apart. . . . But sometimes, it doesn’t matter how far apart you live or how little you talk—it’s still there.” What qualities do you think friends must share in order to have that kind of connection? Discuss your relationship with a best friend. Enhance
Anita Diamant (The Boston Girl)
The pandemic may have originated in the American military post at Fort Riley, Kansas, where a dust storm whipping about tons of incinerated manure had sent hundreds of coughing, stumbling doughboys diagnosed with influenza into the post hospital, where many died. Soon after, American troopships disembarked at Brest and Saint-Nazaire, and French poilus began to fall ill, then British soldiers. Then, as the malady rolled across France, German troops were stricken. The fatality rate was appalling. In the AEF, roughly one out of every three soldiers with influenza died, far worse odds than a man faced in battle.
Joseph E. Persico (Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918)
least 40 million people died as a result of the epidemic, the majority of them suffocated by a lethal accumulation of blood and other fluid in the lungs. Ironically, unlike most flu epidemics, but like the war that preceded and spread it, the influenza of 1918 disproportionately killed young adults. One in every hundred American males between the ages of 25 and 34 fell victim to the ‘Spanish Lady’.
Niall Ferguson (The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks))
Two epidemics swept the world in 1918. One was Spanish influenza, the first recorded outbreak of which was at a Kansas army base in March 1918. As if to mock the efforts of men to kill one another, the virus spread rapidly across the United States and then crossed to Europe on the crowded American troopships.
Niall Ferguson (The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks))
Ironically, it was not the flu that actually killed people but the way in which it weakened them in ways that allowed pneumonia or meningitis could set in.
Charles River Editors (The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic: The History and Legacy of the World’s Deadliest Influenza Outbreak)
As the early outbreak at Fort Riley suggested, the primary breeding ground for the influenza consisted of army camps that were springing up all over America in the early days of 1918. America had entered World War I the previous October, and many young men were anxious to do their part and join the fight.  As a result, the camps soon became overcrowded with recruits and service veterans brought in from all over the country to train them.
Charles River Editors (The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic: The History and Legacy of the World’s Deadliest Influenza Outbreak)
Since that time there have been numerous epidemics of the disease. In 1889 and 1890 the disease was epidemic over practically the entire civilized world. Three years later there was another flare-up of the disease. Both times the epidemic spread widely over the United States. Although the recent epidemic is called ‘Spanish influenza,’ investigation has shown that it did not originate in Spain.  We now know that there was an undue prevalence of influenza in the United States for several years preceding the recent great pandemic. Because the disease occurred in mild form, and because the public mind was focused on the war, this increased prevalence of the disease escaped attention. Not until the epidemic appeared in severe form in Boston in September, 1918, did it excite any special interest.” - U.S. Public Health Service Report, prepared by Surgeon General Rupert Blue
Charles River Editors (The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic: The History and Legacy of the World’s Deadliest Influenza Outbreak)
the Indians who were our neighbors, they were only six miles away. So Dad and the city marshal rode up there one day to see how things were going at the Indian camps and they were horrified at what they saw. After an Indian died, his family and friends would sit around chanting him to the Happy Hunting Grounds and they’d spend all night there. And, by that time, they were all exposed, everybody had the flu. Ultimately, it killed about half the Indians.
Charles River Editors (The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic: The History and Legacy of the World’s Deadliest Influenza Outbreak)
The 1918–19 influenza virus strain, a pandemic which killed forty million people in Europe, Asia and America, was not confined to the war areas, though it struck them hardest.
Paul Johnson (Modern Times)
Still, this particularly virulent and infectious strain of the flu virus is thought to have killed as many as 40 million people around the world between 1918 and 1919.
Scientific American (The Influenza Threat: Pandemic in the Making)
In 1918 and 1919 came the Great Influenza, the Spanish Flu.  The only global pandemic in modern times.  Fifty million to a hundred million dead.  How did Tibet fare this time, you ask?” McAlister’s face was stoic, immobile. Suddenly angry, Undertaker said, “No. You don’t ask, Dr. McAlister; you don’t ask because you already know.  Tibet was barely touched.  A few sick, no one reported dead.
Hunt Kingsbury (Book of Cures (A Thomas McAlister Adventure 2))
The elderly, normally the group most susceptible to influenza, not only survived attacks of the disease but were attacked far less often. This resistance of the elderly was a worldwide phenomenon. The most likely explanation is that an earlier pandemic , so mild as to not attract attention, resembled the 1918 virus closely enough that it provided protection. (p. 408 paperback edition)
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
Investigators today believe that in the United States the 1918–19 epidemic caused an excess death toll of about 675,000 people.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
So the final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that those who occupy positions of authority must lessen the panic that can alienate all within a society. Society cannot function if it is every man for himself. By definition, civilization cannot survive that. Those in authority must retain the public’s trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
A Journal of the Plague Year
Albert Marrin (Very, Very, Very Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918)
But as horrific as the disease itself was, public officials and the media helped create that terror—not by exaggerating the disease but by minimizing it, by trying to reassure. A specialty among public relations consultants has evolved in recent decades called “risk communication.” I don’t much care for the term. For if there is a single dominant lesson from 1918, it’s that governments need to tell the truth in a crisis. Risk communication implies managing the truth. You don’t manage the truth. You tell the truth.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
In 1918 the lies of officials and of the press never allowed the terror to condense into the concrete. The public could trust nothing and so they knew nothing. Society is, ultimately, based on trust; as trust broke down, people became alienated not only from those in authority, but from each other. So a terror seeped into the society that prevented one woman from caring for her sister, that prevented volunteers from bringing food to families too ill to feed themselves and who starved to death because of it, that prevented trained nurses from responding to the most urgent calls for their services. The fear, not the disease, threatened to break the society apart. As Victor Vaughan—a careful man, a measured man, a man who did not overstate to make a point—warned, civilization could have disappeared within a few more weeks.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
The natural reservoir of influenza is generally considered to be birds, especially waterbirds. The big giveaway that a certain species plays the role of reservoir for a certain pathogen is that it doesn’t get sick from it.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
NATURE CHOSE to rage in 1918, and it chose the form of the influenza virus in which to do
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
Perhaps, in some innocent encounter in China between a child and a bird, a new killer flu is on its way. Or perhaps, even now, a young man or a young woman has become infected with two different strains of flu viruses. They are mixing together in the person’s lungs, their genes reassorting. Emerging from that witches’ brew is a new virus, a chimera, that, like the 1918 flu virus, is perfectly suited for destruction. Perhaps, as we grow almost smug about influenza, that most quotidian of infections, a new plague is now gathering deadly force. Except this time we stand armed with a better understanding of the past to better survive the next pandemic.
Gina Kolata (Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It)
knows exactly how serious this threat could be. Nevertheless, we cannot afford to take a chance with the health of our nation.” With that preamble, Ford announced that he was asking Congress to appropriate $135 million “for the production of sufficient vaccine to inoculate every man, woman, and child in the United States,” for a disease that no one could even prove to exist.
Gina Kolata (Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It)
Pig farmers complained to the Centers for Disease Control that the name “swine flu” might frighten people away from eating pork. They asked, to no avail, that the flu’s name be changed to “New Jersey flu.
Gina Kolata (Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It)
But the 1918 virus, like all influenza viruses, like all viruses that form mutant swarms, mutated rapidly. There is a mathematical concept called “reversion to the mean”; this states simply that an extreme event is likely to be followed by a less extreme event. This is not a law, only a probability. The 1918 virus stood at an extreme; any mutations were more likely to make it less lethal than more lethal. In general, that is what happened. So just as it seemed that the virus would bring civilization to its knees, would do what the plagues of the Middle Ages had done, would remake the world, the virus mutated toward its mean, toward the behavior of most influenza viruses. As time went on, it became less lethal.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
For if there is a single dominant lesson from 1918, it’s that governments need to tell the truth in a crisis. Risk communication implies managing the truth. You don’t manage the truth. You tell the truth.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
In a way, these researchers had spent much of their lives preparing for the confrontation that occurred in 1918 not only in general but, for a few of them at least, quite specifically. In every war in American history so far, disease had killed more soldiers than combat. In many wars throughout history, war had spread disease. The leaders of American research had anticipated that a major epidemic of some kind would erupt during the Great War. They had prepared for it as much as it was possible to prepare. Then they waited for it to strike.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
air cannot flow out of the room, only in. There they are bathed in blue ultraviolet light, which kills viruses. After that, they tug on
Gina Kolata (Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It)
To a large degree, the extent of the devastation that the flu caused on American cities depended on how they reacted to it. Those that took prompt action and made good choices had more limited devastation than others.
William Banks Sutton (THE SPANISH FLU: An Unbelievable True Story of the 1918 Great Influenza Pandemic that Devastated the World & What Can We Learn from it. Pictures Included.)
The dollar sign is exalted above the health sign,” said Hassler, referring to the influence of the merchants on the supervisors’ decision.73
Alfred W. Crosby (America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918)
Perhaps the strength of American society in 1918 was only the brief by-product of the war spirit. In the next year or so race riots, bombings, and a hysterical red scare would give proof that Americans were not always filled with mutual love and respect, but for that moment in fall 1918, when everyone in the nation had a fever and aching muscles or personally knew someone who had, Americans did by and large act as if they were all, if not brothers and sisters, at least cousins.
Alfred W. Crosby (America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918)
But the flu was expunged from newspapers, magazines, textbooks, and society’s collective memory. Crosby calls the 1918 flu “America’s forgotten pandemic,” noting:
Gina Kolata (Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It)
The cholera epidemic was a turning point marking the last time the disease would rage without simple precautions of public health.
Gina Kolata (Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It)
Then the influenza epidemic arrived. Unlike the plague of Athens, unlike the Black Death, unlike even the cholera epidemic that felled William Sproat and the other cholera epidemics to come in that century, the flu epidemic had no chronicler.
Gina Kolata (Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It)
States has far fewer hospital beds than a few decades ago. Indeed, during a routine influenza season, usage of respirators rises to nearly 100 percent; in a pandemic, most people who needed a mechanical respirator probably would not get one. (The strain influenza puts on health care was driven home to me in a personal way on my book tour. In Kansas City, a flare-up of ordinary seasonal influenza forced eight hospitals to close emergency rooms, yet this was only a tiny fraction of the pressure a pandemic would exert.) This and similar problems—such as if a particular secondary bacterial invader is resistant to antibiotics, or shortages of such seemingly trivial items as hypodermic needles or bags to hold IV fluids (a severe shortage of these bags is a major problem as I write this)—could easily moot many medical advances since 1918.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
In the summer of 1918 in the U.S., the Spanish influenza first touched someone in Philadelphia. Americans were hoping for an end to the war and the return of their surviving fathers and sons. Many of the nearly 2 million citizens of Philadelphia flocked to theaters to see vaudeville, plays, and big events and concerts, exchanging occasional coughs. Nobody had paid attention to the fact that 8 million Spaniards were sick and dying from a strange new disease named the “Spanish influenza” or that people in Boston had come down with the same thing. The alarm bells were silent.
Jonathan D. Quick (The End of Epidemics: how to stop viruses and save humanity now)
The 1918 epidemic came in two waves, a mild flu in the spring of 1918 followed by the killer flu in the fall. And it seemed that the two flu strains were closely related. Infection with the first strain protected against the second
Gina Kolata (Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It)
Yet even that number understates the horror of the disease, a horror contained in other data. Normally influenza chiefly kills the elderly and infants, but in the 1918 pandemic roughly half of those who died were young men and women in the prime of their life, in their twenties and thirties. Harvey Cushing, then a brilliant young surgeon who would go on to great fame—and who himself fell desperately ill with influenza and never fully recovered from what was likely a complication—would call these victims “doubly dead in that they died so young.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
killed enough to depress the average life expectancy in the United States by more than ten years. Some of those who died from influenza and pneumonia would have died if no epidemic had occurred. Pneumonia was after all the leading cause of death. So the key figure is actually the “excess death” toll. Investigators today believe that in the United States the 1918–19 epidemic caused an excess death toll of about 675,000 people. The nation then had a population between 105 and 110 million, while it was approaching 300 million in 2006. So a comparable figure today would be approximately 1,750,000 deaths.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
Yet the story of the 1918 influenza virus is not simply one of havoc, death, and desolation, of a society fighting a war against nature superimposed on a war against another human society. It is also a story of science, of discovery, of how one thinks, and of how one changes the way one thinks, of how amidst near-utter chaos a few men sought the coolness of contemplation, the utter calm that precedes not philosophizing but grim, determined action.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
I have dwelt at length on famines because they offer such an outstanding example of British colonial malfeasance. One could have cited epidemic disease as well, which constantly laid Indians low under British rule while the authorities stood helplessly by. To take just the first four years of the twentieth century, as Durant did: 272,000 died of plague in 1901, 500,000 in 1902, 800,000 in 1903, and 1 million in 1904 the death toll rising every year. During the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918, 125 million cases of ‘flu were recorded (more than a third of the population), and India’s fatality rate was higher than any Western country’s: 12.5 million people died. As the American statesman (and three-time Democratic presidential candidate) William Jennings Bryan pointed out, many Britons were referring to the deaths caused by plague as ‘a providential remedy for overpopulation’. It was ironic, said Bryan, that British rule was sought to be justified on the grounds that ‘it keeps the people from killing each other, and the plague praised because it removes those whom the Government has saved from slaughter!’.
Shashi Tharoor (Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India)
Hopkirk, like many physicians of his day, also prescribed quinine to treat the flu. “In quinine,” he wrote with great certainty, “we have a drug that not only controls fever-producing processes allied to fermentations, but also exerts a definite anti-toxic action on the specific virus of influenza itself.
Jeremy Brown (Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic)
July the incidence of influenza in the AEF had reached its lowest point since early spring. Only 99 men died of flu and pneumonia that month, and the number was expected to be even lower
Alfred W. Crosby (America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918)
Epidemiological evidence suggests that a new influenza virus originated in Haskell County, Kansas, early in 1918. Evidence further suggests that this virus traveled east across the state to a huge army base, and from there to Europe. Later it began its sweep through North America, through Europe, through South America, through Asia and Africa, through isolated islands in the Pacific, through all the wide world. In its wake followed a keening sound that rose from the throats of mourners like the wind. The evidence comes from Dr. Loring Miner.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
city did take a few precautions. On September 18, its health officials began a public campaign against coughing, spitting, and sneezing. Three days later, the city
Gina Kolata (Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It)
Today such news would galvanize the Medical Corps, but in 1918 it attracted only a modicum of attention.
Alfred W. Crosby (America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918)
In addition to antigenic drift, there is a larger change that the flu virus can undergo, antigenic shift, and that’s how we get our flu pandemics. During this shift, viral proteins assume an entirely new structure, and the virus is said to be “novel.” These novel viruses—which most often arise when animal and human viruses share and swap their genes—are like entirely new criminals, not old ones in disguise. This makes them sneakier, more prolific, and perhaps more deadly. Antigenic shift generated the deadly 1918 influenza virus and the swine flu outbreak of 2009.
Jeremy Brown (Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic)
Epidemiological evidence suggests that a new influenza virus originated in Haskell County, Kansas, early in 1918. Evidence further suggests that this virus traveled east across the state to a huge army base, and from there to Europe. Later it began its sweep through North America, through Europe, through South America, through Asia and Africa, through isolated islands in the Pacific, through all the wide world.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
But in late January and early February 1918, Miner had other concerns. One patient presented with what seemed common symptoms, although with unusual intensity—violent headache and body aches, high fever, nonproductive cough.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
In 1918, the Spanish flu killed about 2.7 percent of the world's population. [60] The risk of an outbreak of influenza against which we do not have a vaccine remains a threat constant, which we should take extremely seriously. During the first months of 2009, thousands of people died from swine flu. For two weeks, it was a recurring topic on the news. However, unlike Ebola in 2014, the number of cases was not doubling, not even increasing in a linear fashion. Some researchers concluded that the flu was not as aggressive as the first warning signs had indicated. However, journalists continued to stoke fear for several weeks.
Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
Epidemiological evidence suggests that a new influenza virus originated in Haskell County, Kansas, early in 1918. Evidence further suggests that this virus traveled east across the state to a huge army base, and from there to Europe. Later it began its sweep through North America, through Europe, through South America, through Asia and Africa, through isolated islands in the Pacific, through all the wide world. In its wake followed a keening sound that rose from the throats of mourners like the wind.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW with absolute certainty whether the 1918–19 influenza pandemic actually did originate in Haskell County, Kansas. There are other theories of origin, including France, Vietnam, and China. But Frank Macfarlane Burnet, a Nobel laureate who lived through the pandemic and spent most of his scientific career studying influenza, later concluded that the evidence was “strongly suggestive” that the 1918 influenza pandemic began in the United States, and that its spread was “intimately related to war conditions and especially the arrival of American troops in France.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
Eissinger, president and “honor man” of Penn’s class of 1918, died. Dudley Perkins, a Swarthmore football hero, died. Nearly two-thirds of the dead were under forty. It was a common practice in 1918 for people to hang a piece of crepe on the door to mark a death in the house. There was crepe everywhere. “If it was a young person they’d put a white crepe at the door,” recalled Anna Milani. “If it was a middle-aged person, they’d put a black crepe, and if it was an elderly one, they put a gray crepe at the door signifying who died. We were children and we were excited to find out who died
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
In 1918, the world population was 1.8 billion, and the pandemic probably killed 50 to 100 million people, with the lowest credible modern estimate at 35 million. Today the world population is 7.6 billion. A comparable death toll today would range from roughly 150 to 425 million.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
problem as I write this)—could easily moot many medical advances since 1918. Disease impact would also ripple through the economy to disastrous effect. With everyone from air traffic controllers to truck drivers out sick, just-in-time inventory systems would crash, supply chains would collapse, for lack of some part production lines would shut down, while schools and day-care facilities might close for weeks, and an overburdened “last mile” would limit the ability of people to work from home.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
Based on studies of what U.S. cities did in 1918, modelers have concluded that “layering” several interventions—most of them different kinds of “social distancing”—would at least stretch out the length of an influenza outbreak in a local community,
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
Based on studies of what U.S. cities did in 1918, modelers have concluded that “layering” several interventions—most of them different kinds of “social distancing”—would at least stretch out the length of an influenza outbreak in a local community, easing the strain on the health care system.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
For if there is a single dominant lesson from 1918, it’s that governments need to tell the truth in a crisis.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
In 1918 the lies of officials and of the press never allowed the terror to condense into the concrete. The public could trust nothing and so they knew nothing.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
Capps’s article appeared in the August 10, 1918, issue of JAMA.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
Today’s world population is 6.3 billion. To give a sense of the impact in today’s world of the 1918 pandemic, one has to adjust for population. If one uses the lowest estimate of deaths—the 21 million figure—that means a comparable figure today would be 73 million dead. The higher estimates translate into between 175 and 350 million dead.
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
Epidemiological evidence suggests that a new influenza virus originated in Haskell County, Kansas, early in 1918. Evidence further suggests that this virus traveled east across the state to a huge army base, and from there to Europe. Later it began its sweep through North America, through Europe, through South America, through Asia and Africa, through isolated islands in the Pacific, through all the wide world. In its wake followed a keening sound that rose from the throats of mourners like the wind. The evidence comes from Dr. Loring Miner. •
John M. Barry (The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History)
Inhabitants of isolated or remote regions where there has been little or no contact with the outside world are often described as “epidemiologically naive.” What this means is that they have limited immunity to diseases like influenza and measles that are endemic in other parts of the world, and when exposed to them they often suffer high rates of death. One of the best-known examples comes from the pandemic of 1918, in which certain populations, notably indigenous Alaskans and Pacific Islanders, died at rates that were four, five, and in some cases even ten times those of other populations. The pandemic is thought to have killed between 3 and 6 percent of the global population; in Western Samoa, 20 percent of the population died. In the nineteenth-century Pacific, this scenario played itself out over and over.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)