Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It
…Alfred Crosby, puzzling over the epidemic’s impact, went to the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature from 1919 to 1921 and counted the column inches devoted to the influenza epidemic as compared with other topics. There were, he wrote, 13 inches citing articles on baseball, 20 inches on Bolshevism, and 47 on Prohibition. Just 8 inches of citations referred to the flu.
Crosby looked at a recent edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The 1918 flu got three sentences. He looked at a recent edition of the Encyclopedia Americana. One sentence was devoted to the flu, and it said that the epidemic killed 21 million people. “That was a gross understatement,” Crosby says. But even so, he remarks, “21 million people? One sentence? Hello?”
…In asking why, Crosby proposes a combination of factors that, he said, acting together accounted for the world’s collective amnesia. For one, he argues, In asking why, Crosby proposes a combination of factors that, he said, acting together accounted for the world’s collective amnesia. For one, he argues, argues, the epidemic simply was so dreadful and so rolled up in people’s minds with the horrors of the war that most people did not want to think about it or write about it once the terrible year of 1918 was over. The flu blended into the general nightmare of World War I, an unprecedented event that introduced trench warfare, submarines, the bloody battles of the Somme and Verdun, and the horrors of chemical warfare.
The sickness preyed on the young and healthy. One day you are fine, strong, and invulnerable. You might be busy at work in your office. Or maybe you are knitting a scarf for the brave troops fighting the war to end all wars. Or maybe you are a soldier reporting for basic training, your first time away from home and family. You might notice a dull headache. Your eyes might start to burn. You start to shiver and you will take to your bed, curling up in a ball. But no amount of blankets can keep you warm. You fall into a restless sleep, dreaming the distorted nightmares of delirium as your fever climbs. And when you drift out of sleep, into a sort of semi-consciousness, your muscles will ache and your head will throb and you will somehow know that, step by step, as your body feebly cries out “no,” you are moving steadily toward death. It may take a few days, it may take a few hours, but there is nothing that can stop the disease’s progress. Doctors and nurses have learned to spot the signs. Your face turns a dark brownish purple. You start to cough up blood. Your feet turn black. Finally, as the end nears, you frantically gasp for breath. A blood-tinged saliva bubbles out of your mouth. You die—by drowning, actually—as your lungs fill with a reddish fluid.
And when a doctor does an autopsy, he will observe your lungs lying heavy and sodden in your chest, engorged with a thin bloody liquid, useless, like slabs of liver. They called the plague of 1918 influenza, but it was like no influenza ever seen before. It was more like a biblical prophecy come true, something from Revelations that predicted that first the world was to be struck by war, then famine, and then, with the breaking of the fourth seal of the scroll foretelling the future, the appearance of a horse, “deathly pale, and its rider was called Plague, and Hades followed at its heels.”
