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The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History
Penguin
February 2005
560 pages
ISBN: 0143034480
Paperback (reprint)
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Non-Fiction
In the winter of 1918, the coldest the American Midwest had
ever endured, history's most lethal influenza virus was
born. Over the next year it flourished, killing as many as
100 million people. It killed more people in twenty-four
weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty-four years, more people
in a year than the Black Death of the Middle Ages killed in
a century. There were many echoes of the Middle Ages in
1918: victims turned blue-black and priests in some of the
world's most modern cities drove horse-drawn carts down the
streets, calling upon people to bring out their dead. But 1918 was not the Middle Ages, and the story of this
epidemic is not simply one of death, suffering, and terror;
it is the story of one war imposed upon the background of
another. For the first time in history, science collided
with epidemic disease, and great scientists - pioneers who
defined modern American medicine - pitted themselves against
a pestilence. The politicians and military commanders of
World War I, focusing upon a different type of enemy,
ignored warnings from these scientists and so fostered
conditions that helped the virus kill. The strain of these
two wars put society itself under almost unimaginable
pressure. Even as scientists began to make progress, the
larger society around them began to crack. Yet ultimately this is a story of triumph amidst tragedy,
illuminating human courage as well as science. In
particular, this courage led a tenacious investigator
directly to one of the greatest scientific discoveries of
the twentieth century - a discovery that has spawned many
Nobel prizes and even now is shaping our future.
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