The Great Influenza by John M. Barry7/5/2023 ![]() He charts how the pandemic brought a measure of scientific maturity to the medical world and profiles such important personalities as Paul Lewis and William Henry Welch, institutions like Johns Hopkins, the Rockefeller Institute, and the Red Cross. (It also tore apart the American medical establishment-but that was for the good.) With the same terrorizing flair of Richard Preston’s Hot Zone, the author follows the disease in the way he might shadow a mugger, presenting us with the vivid aftereffects as if from Weegee’s camera: “Influenza killed more people in a year than the Black Death of the Middle Ages killed in a century it killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty-four years.” But Barry is not interested simply in hugely disturbing numbers. ![]() But influenza tore apart the world’s social fabric for two long years, and it would be a mistake to forget its lessons. This deadly global flu outbreak has gotten hazy in the public memory, and its origins and character were unclear from the beginning, writes popular historian Barry ( Rising Tide, 1997, etc.). ![]() ![]() A keen recounting of the 1918–20 pandemic. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |