Pneumonia Day Quotes

It's like being home again, when they bring in the hopelessly mangled person from the mine explosion, or the woman in her third day of labor, or the famished child struggling against pneumonia and my mother and Prim, they wear that same look on their faces. Now is the times to run away tho the woods, to hide in the trees until the patient is long gone and in another part of the Seam the hammers make the coffin. But I'm held here both by the hovercraft walls and the same force that holds the loved ones of the dying. How often I've seen them, ringed around our kitchen table and I thought, Why don't they leave? Why do they stay to watch? And now I know. It's because you have no choice.

In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.

The force that played havoc with the cortisol in my blood was the same force that helped my body recover; if I felt better one day and worse the next, it was unchanged. It chose no side. It gave the girl next to me in the hospital pneumonia; it also gave her white blood cells that would resist the infection. And the atoms in those cells, and the nuclei in those atoms, the same bits of carbon that were being spun into new planets in some corner of space without a name. My insignificance had become unspeakably beautiful to me. That unified force was a god too massive, too inhuman, to resist with the atheism in which I had been brought up. I became a zealot without a religion.

In the days after my heart attack & before I began to write again, all I could think about was dying. I'd been spared again, and only after the danger had passed did I allow my thoughts to unravel to their inevitable end. I imagined all the ways I could go. Blood clot to the brain. Infarction. Thrombosis. Pneumonia. Grand mal obstruction to the vena cava. I saw myself foaming at the mouth, writhing on the floor. I'd wake up in the night, gripping my throat. And yet. No matter how often I imagined the possible failure of my organs, I found the consequence inconceivable. That it could happen to me. I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.

Why, there’d be soldiers riding guard in the back of potato lorries going to the army’s mess hall—children would follow them, hoping potatoes would fall off into the street. Soldiers would look straight ahead, grim-like, and then flick potatoes off the pile—on purpose. “They did the same thing with oranges. Same with lumps of coal—my, those were precious when we didn’t have no fuel left. There was many such incidents. Just ask Mrs. Godfray about her boy. He had the pneumonia and she was worried half to death because she couldn’t keep him warm nor give him good food to eat. One day there’s a knock on her door and when she opens up, she sees an orderly from the German hospital on the step. Without a peep, he hands her a vial of that sulfonamide, tips his cap, and walks away. He had stolen it from their dispensary for her. They caught him later, trying to steal some again, and they sent him off to prison in Germany—maybe hung him. We’d not be knowing which.

He has so little energy in his body that he can only walk to the bathroom on the other side of the hallway twice a day. After a few meters he is worn out, much worse than after the marathons he used to run. He was a triathlete, he earned a brown belt in judo, became Dutch champion in hockey, until he contracted pneumonia in 2005 and never recovered. Ever since, he has a headache, vertigo, and insomnia, but worst of all the fatigue: after minimal effort his muscles would lose all their strength and take days to recover. Only after a few years did he get a diagnosis: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS).

[G]randma was always afraid of something. She set aside time each day for dread. And not nameless dread. She was quite specific about the various tragedies stalking her. She feared pneumonia, muggers, riptides, meteors, drunk drivers, drug addicts, serial killers, tornadoes, doctors, unscrupulous grocery clerks, and the Russians. The depth of Grandma’s dread came home to me when she bought a lottery ticket and sat before the tv as the numbers were called. After her first three numbers were a match, she began praying feverishly that she wouldn’t have the next three. She dreaded winning, for fear that her heart would give out.

Back on the Hauser regime, I start the day with his notorious "pep breakfast" -- two raw eggs beaten in orange juice. Hauser describes it as a "creamy drink fit for a King's table." I do not feel the same way. This is so much worse than the raw eggs in milk that I drank for the Marilyn Monroe diet. If pneumonia were a food, this is what it would taste like.

Pim is expecting the invasion any day now. Churchill has had pneumonia, but is gradually getting better. Gandhi, the champion of Indian freedom, is on one of his umpteenth hunger strikes.

Roger left the cricket stumps and they went into the drawing room. Grandpapa, at the first suggestion of reading aloud, had disappeared, taking Patch with him. Grandmama had cleared away the tea. She found her spectacles and the book. It was Black Beauty. Grandmama kept no modern children's books, and this made common ground for the three of them. She read the terrible chapter where the stable lad lets Beauty get overheated and gives him a cold drink and does not put on his blanket. The story was suited to the day. Even Roger listened entranced. And Deborah, watching her grandmother's calm face and hearing her careful voice reading the sentences, thought how strange it was that Grandmama could turn herself into Beauty with such ease. She was a horse, suffering there with pneumonia in the stable, being saved by the wise coachman. After the reading, cricket was anticlimax, but Deborah must keep her bargain. She kept thinking of Black Beauty writing the book. It showed how good the story was, Grandmama said, because no child had ever yet questioned the practical side of it, or posed the picture of a horse with a pen in its hoof. "A modern horse would have a typewriter," thought Deborah, and she began to bowl to Roger, smiling to herself as she did so because of the twentieth-century Beauty clacking with both hoofs at a machine. ("The Pool")

On my arrival at Tokyo, I rushed into her house swinging my valise, before going to a hotel, with "Hello, Kiyo, I'm back!" "How good of you to return so soon!" she cried and hot tears streamed down her cheeks. I was overjoyed, and declared that I would not go to the country any more but would start housekeeping with Kiyo in Tokyo. Some time afterward, some one helped me to a job as assistant engineer at the tram car office. The salary was 25 yen a month, and the house rent six. Although the house had not a magnificent front entrance, Kiyo seemed quite satisfied, but, I am sorry to say, she was a victim of pneumonia and died in February this year. On the day preceding her death, she asked me to bedside, and said, "Please, Master Darling, if Kiyo is dead, bury me in the temple yard of Master Darling. I will be glad to wait in the grave for my Master Darling." So Kiyo's grave is in the Yogen temple at Kobinata.

Though their doctors dutifully record such distinct entities as stroke, or cardiac failure, or pneumonia, these aged folk have in fact died because something in them has worn out. Long before the days of scientific medicine, everyone understood this. On July 5, 1814, when he was seventy-one years old, Thomas Jefferson wrote to the seventy-eight-year-old John Adams, "But our machines have now been running seventy or eighty years, and we must expect that, worn as they are, here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring, will be giving way; and however we may tinker them up for awhile, all will at length surcease motion.

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.

but I didn’t realize how sick Leon was until he arrived at the studio in LA. He looked like the ailing patriarch in a Tennessee Williams play: a long white beard, dark glasses and a cane. He struggled to walk. He would sit in a La-Z-Boy recliner in the studio for a couple of hours a day and sing and play. That was all he could manage, but what he did in those two hours was incredible. There were moments when I wondered if his contributions to the album were going to be released posthumously. One day, his nose started running: it was fluid leaking from his brain. He was rushed into hospital for surgery and treated for heart failure and pneumonia while he was there.

On a bleak day in April, just before the first crocuses broke through the sodden gray of autumn leaves, Ann, that was her name, Krey’s love, got Stage 1 of Dying Stupidly. A scratch from a squirrel she was feeding got infected. Some days later, they gave her penicillin. Then they put her in the hospital where she got streptococcal pneumonia. From scratch to burial took a month.

The winter was harsh. Kay had been spending days in her trailer hunkered down under piles of blankets—some even say with an older bear named Betty Sue. Her skin was turning gray, which could suggest emphysema, pneumonia, or a pending heart attack. The fact that her outerwear was found untorn could also suggest hypothermia, which sometimes makes victims feel like they’re burning up. Hopkins told me that Kay probably collapsed while walking back to her home. He said it’s even possible that

Do what you like with the play,’ Edgar had wired from Hollywood, ‘and God love you, Gerald.’ The message of faith and affection made Gerald more determined than ever to produce a success and to be able to repay Edgar for his trust and generosity. By a tremendous effort the play was pulled into shape and presented to the public on the 9th of February, but it was overshadowed on the opening night with the grave news that the author was dangerously ill in Hollywood with a sudden attack of double pneumonia. The following day the message came that Edgar Wallace was dead.

So—there were still four hundred scabs, and it was painful to think of them as scabs because they were just like the others, but they were frightened. They were frightened because they were hungry now, but if they lost their jobs they would be hungrier, and winter was coming. Winter haunted them all because there was only scrub cotton to pick for awhile, maybe a few oranges now and then, maybe not anything. There were colds and flu and pneumonia, and babies being born and unborn, and school, and shoes wearing out. There were old men and women dying, and sometimes the young died before their time. Babies died. Life was just a little thing to them: a shrunken breast, a colorless tent wall in their curious sight, hunger without name and explanation, pain, and the dark. Sometimes in the short winter days, the mothers looked at old magazines and saw ads for milk and pretty blankets and lacy pillows, and insurance for your baby’s education, and sometimes they found articles about how to care for a baby, and they knew why their babies died. They knew anyway. Often they wondered why their babies did not die, how they could survive without all the things necessary to babies in the outside world.

We took a hike in Malibu and shared ice cream. I stayed with him while he had walking pneumonia, heating soup and pouring him glass after glass of ginger ale and feeling his fevered forehead as he slept. He warned me of the life that was coming for me if I wasn’t careful. Success was a scary thing for a young person, he said. I was twenty-four and he was thirty-three (“Jesus’s age,” he reminded me more than a few times). There was something tender about him, broken and gentle, and I could imagine that sex with him might be similar. I wouldn’t have to pretend like I did with other guys. Maybe we would both cry. Maybe it would feel just as good as sharing a bed. On Valentine’s Day, I put on lace underwear and begged him to please, finally, have sex with me. The litany of excuses he presented in response was comic in its tragedy: “I want to get to know you.” “I don’t have a condom.” “I’m scared, because I just like you too much.” He took an Ambien and fell asleep, arm over my side, and as I lay there, wide awake and itchy in my lingerie set, it occurred to me: this was humiliating, unsexy, and, worst sin of all, boring. This wasn’t comfort. This was paralysis. This was distance passing for connection. I was being desexualized in slow motion, becoming a teddy bear with breasts.

From the Author Matthew 16:25 says, “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”  This is a perfect picture of the life of Nate Saint; he gave up his life so God could reveal a greater glory in him and through him. I first heard the story of Operation Auca when I was eight years old, and ever since then I have been inspired by Nate’s commitment to the cause of Christ. He was determined to carry out God’s will for his life in spite of fears, failures, and physical challenges. For several years of my life, I lived and ministered with my parents who were missionaries on the island of Jamaica. My experiences during those years gave me a passion for sharing the stories of those who make great sacrifices to carry the gospel around the world. As I wrote this book, learning more about Nate Saint’s life—seeing his spirit and his struggles—was both enlightening and encouraging to me. It is my prayer that this book will provide a window into Nate Saint’s vision—his desires, dreams, and dedication. I pray his example will convince young people to step out of their comfort zones and wholeheartedly seek God’s will for their lives. That is Nate Saint’s legacy: changing the world for Christ, one person and one day at a time.   Nate Saint Timeline 1923 Nate Saint born. 1924 Stalin rises to power in Russia. 1930 Nate’s first flight, aged 7 with his brother, Sam. 1933 Nate’s second flight with his brother, Sam. 1936 Nate made his public profession of faith. 1937 Nate develops bone infection. 1939 World War II begins. 1940 Winston Churchill becomes British Prime Minister. 1941 Nate graduates from Wheaton College. Nate takes first flying lesson. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. 1942 Nate’s induction into the Army Air Corps. 1943 Nate learns he is to be transferred to Indiana. 1945 Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan by U.S. 1946 Nate discharged from the Army. 1947 Nate accepted for Wheaton College. 1948 Nate and Marj are married and begin work in Eduador. Nate crashes his plane in Quito. 1949 Nate’s first child, Kathy, is born. Germany divided into East and West. 1950 Korean War begins. 1951 Nate’s second child, Stephen, is born. 1952 The Saint family return home to the U.S. 1953 Nate comes down with pneumonia. Nate and Henry fly to Ecuador. 1954 The first nuclear-powered submarine is launched. Nate’s third child, Phillip, is born. 1955 Nate is joined by Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming and Roger Youderian. Nate spots an Auca village for the first time. Operation Auca commences. 1956 The group sets up camp four miles from the Auca territory. Nate and the group are killed on “Palm Beach”.

Cantor was born to a family of Russian immigrants, Jan. 31, 1892, in New York’s Lower East Side. His mother died soon after his birth; his father died of pneumonia a year later. His given name was either Isadore Itzkowitz or Edward Israel Iskowitz (he claimed both during his life). He was raised by a grandmother who was 60 when he was born. In his autobiography he describes a childhood filled with tenement-life hardship, “poverty, misery, and disease.” At 6, when he entered public school, his Grandma Esther enrolled him under her name, Kantrowitz, which the registrar wrote down as “Kanter.” When he was older, he changed it to “Cantor.” He began calling himself “Eddie” because his girlfriend Ida Tobias, the “belle of Henry Street,” liked the way it sounded on him. In his own words, he was “truant from school, pilferer of pushcarts, hooligan, street fighter, liar.” He slept on rooftops and sang for change on street corners. For years he remembered wearing shoes “pulpy with wet cardboard” and clothes that held the damp of snow all day long.

After a patient of his with pneumonia coughed in his face, Vink’s energy and endurance quickly tanked. He estimated that from one day to the next he lost 70-80% of the power in his legs. Very quickly this former marathoner was unable to walk 30 yards without having to rest for 15 minutes. He also experienced severe dizziness, headaches (for the first time in his life) and problems sleeping. Graded exercise therapy (GET) caused him to relapse further and he ended up bedridden.

Block said. “I mean, he’s a professor emeritus. He’s never watched a football game in my conscious memory. The whole picture—it wasn’t the guy I thought I knew.” But the conversation proved critical, because after surgery he developed bleeding in the spinal cord. The surgeons told her that in order to save his life they would need to go back in. But the bleeding had already made him nearly quadriplegic, and he would remain severely disabled for many months and likely forever. What did she want to do? “I had three minutes to make this decision, and I realized, he had already made the decision.” She asked the surgeons whether, if her father survived, he would still be able to eat chocolate ice cream and watch football on TV. Yes, they said. She gave the okay to take him back to the operating room. “If I had not had that conversation with him,” she told me, “my instinct would have been to let him go at that moment because it just seemed so awful. And I would have beaten myself up. Did I let him go too soon?” Or she might have gone ahead and sent him to surgery, only to find—as occurred—that he was faced with a year of “very horrible rehab” and disability. “I would have felt so guilty that I condemned him to that,” she said. “But there was no decision for me to make.” He had decided. During the next two years, he regained the ability to walk short distances. He required caregivers to bathe and dress him. He had difficulty swallowing and eating. But his mind was intact and he had partial use of his hands—enough to write two books and more than a dozen scientific articles. He lived for ten years after the operation. Eventually, however, his difficulties with swallowing advanced to the point where he could not eat without aspirating food particles, and he cycled between hospital and rehabilitation facilities with the pneumonias that resulted. He didn’t want a feeding tube. And it became evident that the battle for the dwindling chance of a miraculous recovery was going to leave him unable ever to go home again. So, just a few months before I’d spoken with Block, her father decided to stop the battle and go home. “We started him on hospice care,” Block said. “We treated his choking and kept him comfortable. Eventually, he stopped eating and drinking. He died about five days later.

Last year, the morning of the day he died in a nursing home, wasted from age and pneumonia, his father asked Ethan in a raspy voice, “You spend time with your son?” “Much as I can,” he’d answered, but his father had caught the lie in his eyes. “It’ll be your loss, Ethan. Day’ll come, when he’s grown and it’s too late, that you’d give a kingdom to go back and spend a single hour with your son as a boy. To hold him. Read a book to him. Throw a ball with a person in whose eyes you can do no wrong. He doesn’t see your failings yet. He looks at you with pure love and it won’t last, so you revel in it while it’s here.

After being wounded and carried behind the lines on the night of May 2, Stonewall Jackson had his arm amputated, after which he was transported to Thomas C. Chandler's plantation well behind the battle lines to convalesce. He seemed to be recovering, and his wife and newborn daughter joined him at the plantation, but his doctors were unaware Jackson was exhibiting common symptoms that indicated oncoming pneumonia. Jackson lay dying in the Chandler plantation outbuilding on Sunday, May 10, 1863 with his wife Anna at his side. He comforted his wife, telling her, “It is the Lord’s Day…my wish is fulfilled.  I always wanted to die on Sunday.”  Near the end, a delirious Jackson seemed to have his mind on war, blurting out, “Tell A. P. Hill to prepare for actions!  Pass the infantry to the front!  Tell Major Hawks…” His final words were “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” The

On January 12, 2020, China publicly shared the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus, just twelve days after Wuhan Municipal Health Commission, China, reported a cluster of cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, Hubei Province. Some ten to fifteen years ago that would have been completely unthinkable.

In other words, the number of hospitalizations that the CDC was reporting each day weren’t people who were actually being admitted to the hospital but were hypothetical patients being modeled off a small sample that the CDC was collecting.16 The CDC reported on the number of hospitalizations each day as if it were tabulating these totals, but it wasn’t. Making matters more uncertain, the data that underpinned that modeling exercise was being lifted from a system that had been built years earlier as a way to monitor the prevalence of hospital-acquired infections like urinary tract infections and hospital-acquired pneumonias, not for tracking hospital admissions.

(Perhaps they were recalling the fate of William Henry Harrison, who had caught a cold at his bitterly frigid 1841 inauguration and died of pneumonia a month later.)

Fifteen years ago, Israeli scientists published a study in which engineers observed patient care in ICUs for twenty-four-hour stretches. They found that the average patient required 178 individual actions per day, ranging from administering a drug to suctioning the lungs, and every one of them posed risks. Remarkably, the nurses and doctors were observed to make an error in just 1 percent of these actions—but that still amounted to an average of two errors a day with every patient. Intensive care succeeds only when we hold the odds of doing harm low enough for the odds of doing good to prevail. This is hard. There are dangers simply in lying unconscious in bed for a few days. Muscles atrophy. Bones lose mass. Pressure ulcers form. Veins begin to clot. You have to stretch and exercise patients’ flaccid limbs daily to avoid contractures; you have to give subcutaneous injections of blood thinners at least twice a day, turn patients in bed every few hours, bathe them and change their sheets without knocking out a tube or a line, brush their teeth twice a day to avoid pneumonia from bacterial buildup in their mouths. Add a ventilator, dialysis, and the care of open wounds, and the difficulties only accumulate.

This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal. Line infections are so common that they are considered a routine complication. ICUs put five million lines into patients each year, and national statistics show that after ten days 4 percent of those lines become infected. Line infections occur in eighty thousand people a year in the United States and are fatal between 5 and 28 percent of the time, depending on how sick one is at the start. Those who survive line infections spend on average a week longer in intensive care. And this is just one of many risks. After ten days with a urinary catheter, 4 percent of American ICU patients develop a bladder infection. After ten days on a ventilator, 6 percent develop bacterial pneumonia, resulting in death 40 to 45 percent of the time. All in all, about half of ICU patients end up experiencing a serious complication, and once that occurs the chances of survival drop sharply.

A celebrated Philadelphia neurologist had gone to bed after an exceptionally tiring day. Suddenly he was awakened by someone knocking on his door. Opening it he found a little girl, poorly dressed and deeply upset. She told him her mother was very sick and asked him if he would please come with her. It was a bitterly cold, snowy night, but though he was bone tired, the doctor dressed and followed the girl. As Reader’s Digest reports the story, he found the mother desperately ill with pneumonia. After arranging for medical care, he complimented the sick woman on the intelligence and persistence of her little daughter. The woman looked at him strangely and then said, “My daughter died a month ago.” She added, “Her shoes and coat are in the clothes closet there.” Amazed and perplexed, the doctor went to the closet and opened the door. There hung the very coat worn by the little girl who had brought him to tend to her mother. It was warm and dry and could not possibly have been out in the wintry night.

I have traveled endlessly around the world for the last three years, been tested countless times, felt unwell many times, but never tested positive, and yet this is the one time I test positive?!? This trip, to visit my aging parents so I can spend some quality time with them in the winter of their years! Really!?! Felicity calmed me down as usual. We called my parents and alerted them. Two days later we got a call that my father was in the hospital with Covid and pneumonia in one lung. They put him on intravenous antibiotics. By the next day he was a bit better, but then they removed the IV and he was told that the pneumonia was Covid induced and that the antibiotics would not work. That was confusing. But they gave him remdesivir to treat the virus. I am very nervous about his condition, especially since I am undoubtedly the one who gave him the virus.

At three o’clock in the morning of Friday, 14th September 1941, I died peacefully in my bed from pneumonia. Friday was a good day to die, because on that day Lieutenant Bruning left early for Athens and did not get back until night–so it gave a man a decent twelve hours to be buried in.

Last year, the morning of the day he died in a nursing home, wasted from age and pneumonia, his father asked Ethan in a raspy voice, “You spend time with your son?” “Much as I can,” he’d answered, but his father had caught the lie in his eyes. “It’ll be your loss, Ethan. Day’ll come, when he’s grown and it’s too late, that you’d give a kingdom to go back and spend a single hour with your son as a boy. To hold him. Read a book to him. Throw a ball with a person in whose eyes you can do no wrong. He doesn’t see your failings yet. He looks at you with pure love and it won’t last, so you revel in it while it’s here.” Ethan thinks often of that conversation, mostly when he’s lying awake in bed at night and everyone else is asleep, and his life screaming past at the speed of light—the weight of bills and the future and his prior failings and all these moments he’s missing—all the lost joy—perched like a boulder on his chest.

Emerson died April 27, 1882, after a few days' illness from pneumonia. Dr. Garnett in his excellent biography says: "Seldom had 'the reaper whose name is Death' gathered such illustrious harvest as between December 1880 and April 1882.

The primary cause of death was listed as cryptococcal pneumonia, which was a consequence of his Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Those, however, were only the obvious diseases. The KS lesions, it turned out, covered not only his skin but also his lungs, bronchi, spleen, bladder, lymph nodes, mouth, and adrenal glands. His eyes were infected not only with cytomegalovirus but also with Cryptococcus and the Pneumocystis protozoa. It was the first time the pathologist could recall seeing the protozoa infect a person’s eye. Ken’s mother claimed his body from the hospital the day after he died. By the afternoon, Ken’s remains were cremated and tucked into a small urn. His Kaposi’s sarcoma had led to the discovery in San Francisco of the epidemic that would later be called Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. He had been the first KS case in the country reported to a disbelieving Centers for Disease Control just eight months before. Now, he was one of eighteen such stricken people in San Francisco and the fourth man in the city to die in the epidemic, the seventy-fourth to die in the United States. There would be many, many more.

It might not sound like it, but the theme of this chapter is optimism. We are amid a modern health crisis. The good news is that our system can be fixed, and the crisis can end. Just 120 years ago, starvation, malnutrition, and early death were the norm. Tuberculosis and pneumonia were leading causes of death. Life expectancy in the United States was around age forty-seven. Back then, 30 percent of all U.S. deaths occurred in children under five years of age, compared to just 1.4 percent in 1999. If you transported someone living in those times to the present day, they’d be in utter shock as they tried to process society’s advancements. There is no

Little Gracie Watson was born in 1883, the only child of her parents. Her father was manager of the Pulaski House, where the beautiful and charming little girl was a favorite with the guests. Two days before Easter, in April 1889, Gracie died of pneumonia at the age of six. In 1890, when the rising sculptor John Walz moved

young man gets into my compartment. Tim suggests in a whisper that I should move into a ‘Ladies Only’, next door, which already contains two women and three children. Refuse unconditionally to change, after which I worry all day in case anything should happen to Tim while I am away (he might be run over, or poisoned, or die of pneumonia – knowing the traffic in the streets, the food at Brown’s Hotel, and the peculiar climate of the neighbourhood, all three deaths seem possible) and I have refused his last request.

He would be forty-five now, a grown man, if he had not died that fall. His final pneumonia took him quickly: a fever that rocketed skyward, the tiny, bottlelike lungs filling, coma, death within hours. After all he’d been through, it seemed a mercy, though of course that was an illusion, something to say to fill the silence of his missing life: the bicycle he would not ride, the books he would not read, the friends he would not have and the girl he would not kiss. The thousand pains and pleasures of his life, shelved in a tomb that the door of early death had sealed. No, there was no mercy in what happened to my boy at all. When he died, he weighed just eleven pounds. It’s said that many marriages do not survive the loss of a child, that such grief is a room parents enter together but depart alone. I have no cause to argue the point, having sat in just that room. From that day forward we loved each other, Meredith and I, but we loved with broken hearts. And when, on a morning not long after we had buried Sam, I came into the kitchen to find Meredith standing at the window, cupping the curve of her stomach in a secret way that I alone understood, I knew we would go on.

In the case of bloodletting, the first comparative experiment was published in 1836 by the French doctor Pierre Louis, who had treated some pneumonia sufferers by immediately relieving them of a few pints of blood and others by holding off on the leeches for a few days. In the first group, 44% died; in the second, 25%.8 In essence, Dr. Louis had carried out the first-ever clinical trials, and bloodletting came out looking pretty dicey.

ARDS by no means accounts for all the influenza deaths in 1918 and 1919, or even for a majority of them. It explains only those who died in a few days, and it explains why so many young healthy people died. Although influenza almost certainly killed some people in ways that had little to do with the lungs—for example, someone whose already weak heart could not stand the additional strain of fighting the disease—the overwhelming majority of non-ARDS deaths came from bacterial pneumonias. The destruction of the epithelial cells eliminated the sweeping action that clears so much of the respiratory tract of bacteria, and the virus damaged or exhausted other parts of the immune system as well. That gave the normal bacterial flora of the mouth unimpeded entry into the lungs. Recent research also suggests that the neuraminidase on the influenza virus makes it easier for some bacteria to attach to lung tissue, creating a lethal synergy between the virus and these bacteria. And in the lungs, the bacteria began to grow.

In 1977 a psychologist and epidemiologist named Ernest M. Gruenberg at Johns Hopkins University called the rise of these immiserating diseases the “failures of success”: the more the health care system enabled people to survive to old age, the more they developed chronic diseases that sucked the quality out of life. Gruenberg argued that we should view health care as an epidemiological force, like a pathogen, which reduces rates of death but increases rates of sickness and disability. The system’s priorities were twisted, Gruenberg believed, because it was preoccupied with extending life, not health. So research dollars went to picking off the acute causes of death, which tend to work pretty quickly, rather than to delaying or preventing chronic diseases that drag on and on, bringing whole families into their circle of pain. To Gruenberg, this went against the oath to do no harm. If cancer patients typically die of pneumonia, say, and we develop treatments for pneumonia, all we’ve done for their cancer is ensure that they spend more years dying of it. In place of a day on their deathbed, we’ve given them a month and called it progress. “Instead of enhancing the people’s health this kind of deathly thinking has been increasing the people’s sickness and disability,” he wrote. “Now that we recognize that our life-saving technology of the past four decades has outstripped our health-preserving technology and that the net effect has been to worsen the people’s health, we must begin the search for preventable causes of the chronic illnesses which we have been extending.” Yes, medicine was helping us live longer, Gruenberg said, but the extra years were added at the end, when we were too weak or sick to enjoy them.

On January 25, 1920, Sophie Halberstadt, mother of Ernst and Heinerle and pregnant with her third child, died just one day before her seventh wedding anniversary. The cause of death was fulminant influenza pneumonia (E. Freud et al., 1976, p. 26; Gay, 1988, p. 391; Schur, 1972, p. 318). Max took Ernst into the living room, sat him on his knee, and told him the one thing that no father wants to tell his child—that his mother was dead. Ernst shut down. Freud later wrote, “When this child was five and three-quarters, his mother died. Now that she was really ‘gone’ (‘o-o-o’), the little boy showed no signs of grief” (S. Freud, 1920/1955, SE 18, p. 16). Max set up, on the crossbeam of the door frame, a small swing on which Ernst anxiously swung for hours on end in a desperate attempt to soothe himself.

Our lives are, in so many ways, shaped by the microorganisms that live on us, inside us, and around us. The estimated forty trillion bacteria in our gut, for example, help us digest everything we eat. Disturbing the healthy bacteria that colonize our gut can lead to dangerous blood infections. Today, to diagnose blood infections like those or lung infections like pneumonia, we take a sample of blood or sputum and grow the accompanying bacteria in a lab under special conditions. Eventually, the bacteria are stained and inspected under the microscope and exposed to various antibiotics to determine which ones can kill them. This process takes days. Meanwhile, we treat the patient with our “best guess” antibiotics. In the future, we will sequence those bacteria immediately and map their DNA to

In two polio epidemics in the preceding decade, public health officials had all but closed down the city. But now Copeland did nothing. Three days later, as hospitals began filling with influenza cases, he made influenza and pneumonia reportable diseases, while simultaneously stating that “other bronchial diseases and not the so-called Spanish influenza are said to be responsible for the illness of the majority of persons who were reported to be ill with influenza. . . .” A few days more and even Copeland could no longer deny reality. People could see disease all about them. Finally he warned, “The health department is prepared to compel patients who may be a menace to the community to go to hospitals.” He also assured all concerned “that the disease is not getting away from the control of the health department but is decreasing.

She considered it a great relief when a few days later she heard that her abandoned husband had caught pneumonia.

Meanwhile, the Mosteks spent a frantic hour trying to comprehend the dire nature of Rece’s situation. Then Dr. Sammut entered the waiting room and gave the worried parents a thumbs-up. Inside a plastic vial was the unbelievable item that had nearly taken Rece’s life: a popcorn kernel that had been lodged in his left lung. Rece’s condition was the result of a perfect storm. Months earlier, he had inhaled a kernel of popcorn, which became lodged in his right lung. This led to infections and breathing problems, including pneumonia. But his excessive coughing earlier that day had thrust the kernel from the right lung and propelled it into his left lung, where it unluckily blocked his airway.

She very nearly died just before Christmas,” yelled Mrs. Taylor, looking skywards again in some impatience. “She got pneumonia. Mary came over every day, and so did I. There was hard frost. We were both dead tired and mingled our tears. We knew that little Greatbatch couldn’t really do anything for her, and what was worse, she knew it too. She told him when I was there one evening that she had so much hoped to see the Victory procession from the stand at her son’s club, and that it would be a great disappointment to her if she had to leave this war unfinished.

Indoor air pollution is linked to respiratory diseases such as pneumonia, bronchitis, and lung cancer. Women and children who spend long periods every day around traditional open fires inhale the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes a day.