Laura Spinney’s “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World” (2017) was an easy choice. When I learned that my grandmother’s uncle, a physician, had died of the flu, I was hooked on pandemics, viruses, and vaccines. Hultin’s innovation and chutzpah, which was a match to the cleverness and tenacity of the H1N1 virus that killed (conservatively) 50,000,000 people, and perhaps up to 100,000,000. He talked to locals found graves that were in the permafrost and obtained permission to remove lung tissue samples from people who probably died of influenza. Johan Hultin, a retired San Francisco pathologist who flew up to Alaska on a commercial flight with his wife’s pruning shears and a cooler, was. There was a group of people that went up to Alaska with lots of equipment and white hazmat suits to try to exhume bodies. Drawing on the latest research in history, virology, epidemiology, psychology, and economics, Pale Rider masterfully recounts the little-known catastrophe that forever changed humanity.Ī Predilection for Those in the Prime of LifeĪbout 20 years ago, I watched a PBS show on the flu pandemic of 1918 that was probably PublicResourceOrg’s, “We Heard the Bells: The Influenza of 1918.” In 1998, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology wanted to obtain tissue samples of the virus. It also created the true "lost generation". It was partly responsible, Spinney argues, for pushing India to independence, South Africa to apartheid, and Switzerland to the brink of civil war. As socially significant as both world wars, the Spanish flu dramatically disrupted - and often permanently altered - global politics, race relations, and family structures while spurring innovation in medicine, religion, and the arts. In this gripping narrative history, Laura Spinney traces the overlooked pandemic to reveal how the virus travelled across the globe, exposing mankind's vulnerability and putting our ingenuity to the test.
But despite a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people, it exists in our memory as an afterthought to World War I. It infected a third of the people on Earth - from the poorest immigrants of New York City to the king of Spain, Franz Kafka, Mahatma Gandhi, and Woodrow Wilson. The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was one of the greatest human disasters of all time.
In 1918, the Italian-Americans of New York, the Yupik of Alaska, and the Persians of Mashed had almost nothing in common except for a virus - one that triggered the worst pandemic of modern times and had a decisive effect on the history of the 20th century.
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