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Death and war and sorrow and bad stuff
Jan. 18th, 2012 11:05 pmHello folks! It's 2012! You know what that means, right? It means someone somewhere has pulled another half-assed apocalypse theory out of nowhere (I believe they are pretending the Mexicans are to blame for this one) so we can have fun Halloween fake-scared-ness all year, except without the fun costumes. Apparently that still makes you weird. But I digress.
In honor of the beginning of the end of the world, I decided it was time to revisit my old passion for history books about periods of time where civilization almost collapsed due to pandemic disease! It's been almost a year since I read anything like that, which was when I read The Ghost Map, about a lethal cholera outbreak. And that one didn't even almost collapse civilization, because it wasn't widespread enough.
This time, out of my ginormous pile of books borrowed from Paul, I selected John M. Barry's The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, although its subtitle seems to have now been changed to The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.
There are two really interesting points about Spanish Influenza that I hadn't really grasped until I read this book: one, these flu waves were short, only lasting weeks or even days. (There were technically three waves, of which the second was the biggest, and they all happened within a year.) Two, the Spanish Influenza is shockingly underrepresented in popular culture, considering how terrifying it apparently was. Off the top of my head, I can only remember hearing about it in pop culture twice--as part of Edward Cullen's backstory in Twilight (gag) and it briefly shows up in Downton Abbey (and that's all I'm going to say about that!). I guess if you need a character to die in that time period it's more dramatic to have them die in the war. But there also seems to be a lack of creepy contemporary artwork like all those dancing skeleton pictures that happened around the Black Plague, which is sort of odd.
This book tells the story of the influenza from a bunch of different angles, although the dominant one is the goings-on of the medical research establishment. Apparently, American medicine was still positively medieval up to a very soon before the war, when some researchers decided to create an American medical school in the style of the German research universities where people actually learned about medicine. So there is a lot of who's who in pioneering American medical research, and a fair amount of office gossip, which is fun. As we get closer to the time of the influenza actually happening, Mr. Barry takes us into the world of government and press activity, which largely boiled down to "demand blind obedience and optimism at all times." This may have actually caused mass panic when the influenza hit, because it's impossible to ignore that Big Brother is lying to you when the newspapers say "Influenza's no big, just try not to spit on anybody or worry too much and you'll be fine" but there are bodies stacking up in the streets because the city's out of coffins. The book also contains a fair amount of really terrifying eyewitness descriptions from all sorts of people who survived the pandemic, including doctors, nurses, recovered patients, funeral directors, general civilians, and some people who went on an emergency treatment-dispensing trip to Alaska and found entire Inuit villages wiped out. Other parts of the book examine the various studies done to estimate the actual death tolls of the flu and the likelihood of something like that happening again. (Of these, the death toll studies are more interesting, because every book about epidemics examines the likelihood of it happening again, and they basically all end up saying "WATCH OUT AHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA". Granted, I basically said that too when I was writing my Problems of Globalization paper. Although perhaps that is why it does not impress me anymore.)
Because this book is ridiculously well researched and full of all sorts of fun social, historical, and epidemiological tidbits (also the biology explanations are fun in a sort of awkward "BIO FOR NON-SCIENTISTS!" kind of way; he quotes Marshall McLuhan while explaining antigen drift and it's contrived and hilarious), I cannot come up with any bad things to say about it that are not purely stylistic. Anyway, here are my purely stylistic critiques:
1. Occasional use of pseudogeneric he
2. Repeated catchphrase of "influenza, only influenza" that I think was done in order to provide a common thread through the work but struck me as too cute
3. Attempt to find irony in the redirection of military resources from trying to kill Germans so the Germans don't kill Americans to trying to kill small organisms so that the small organisms don't kill Americans, via framing "killing Germans" as "fighting to kill" and "killing small organisms" as "fighting to save lives". These are not really opposite things.
That is really all I have to complain about, and it is more than outweighed by all the gory details of various cities' infrastructures being completely unable to deal with the sudden massive uptick in corpses (particularly since funeral directors and gravediggers and such were also dying in great numbers). There are even several pages of disturbing pictures!
Morbid tidbit: One of the really scary things about this flu (which is also one of the really scary things about AIDS) was that it disproportionately targeted young adults, who usually have the best immune systems, and when the young adults got it, they tended to die the fastest and most painfully, and the doctors would find that their lungs were literally torn up. This turns out to be because the virus triggered a massive and indiscriminate immune system reaction, and the waste from this reaction would get deposited into the spaces between the alveoli of the lungs, tearing the lungs apart and killing the victim.
Other morbid tidbit: There is some evidence, much of it anecdotal, that Spanish influenza sometimes may have caused neurological issues in survivors.
There are many additional morbid tidbits available in the book, if you are interested in that sort of thing.
In honor of the beginning of the end of the world, I decided it was time to revisit my old passion for history books about periods of time where civilization almost collapsed due to pandemic disease! It's been almost a year since I read anything like that, which was when I read The Ghost Map, about a lethal cholera outbreak. And that one didn't even almost collapse civilization, because it wasn't widespread enough.
This time, out of my ginormous pile of books borrowed from Paul, I selected John M. Barry's The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, although its subtitle seems to have now been changed to The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.
There are two really interesting points about Spanish Influenza that I hadn't really grasped until I read this book: one, these flu waves were short, only lasting weeks or even days. (There were technically three waves, of which the second was the biggest, and they all happened within a year.) Two, the Spanish Influenza is shockingly underrepresented in popular culture, considering how terrifying it apparently was. Off the top of my head, I can only remember hearing about it in pop culture twice--as part of Edward Cullen's backstory in Twilight (gag) and it briefly shows up in Downton Abbey (and that's all I'm going to say about that!). I guess if you need a character to die in that time period it's more dramatic to have them die in the war. But there also seems to be a lack of creepy contemporary artwork like all those dancing skeleton pictures that happened around the Black Plague, which is sort of odd.
This book tells the story of the influenza from a bunch of different angles, although the dominant one is the goings-on of the medical research establishment. Apparently, American medicine was still positively medieval up to a very soon before the war, when some researchers decided to create an American medical school in the style of the German research universities where people actually learned about medicine. So there is a lot of who's who in pioneering American medical research, and a fair amount of office gossip, which is fun. As we get closer to the time of the influenza actually happening, Mr. Barry takes us into the world of government and press activity, which largely boiled down to "demand blind obedience and optimism at all times." This may have actually caused mass panic when the influenza hit, because it's impossible to ignore that Big Brother is lying to you when the newspapers say "Influenza's no big, just try not to spit on anybody or worry too much and you'll be fine" but there are bodies stacking up in the streets because the city's out of coffins. The book also contains a fair amount of really terrifying eyewitness descriptions from all sorts of people who survived the pandemic, including doctors, nurses, recovered patients, funeral directors, general civilians, and some people who went on an emergency treatment-dispensing trip to Alaska and found entire Inuit villages wiped out. Other parts of the book examine the various studies done to estimate the actual death tolls of the flu and the likelihood of something like that happening again. (Of these, the death toll studies are more interesting, because every book about epidemics examines the likelihood of it happening again, and they basically all end up saying "WATCH OUT AHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA". Granted, I basically said that too when I was writing my Problems of Globalization paper. Although perhaps that is why it does not impress me anymore.)
Because this book is ridiculously well researched and full of all sorts of fun social, historical, and epidemiological tidbits (also the biology explanations are fun in a sort of awkward "BIO FOR NON-SCIENTISTS!" kind of way; he quotes Marshall McLuhan while explaining antigen drift and it's contrived and hilarious), I cannot come up with any bad things to say about it that are not purely stylistic. Anyway, here are my purely stylistic critiques:
1. Occasional use of pseudogeneric he
2. Repeated catchphrase of "influenza, only influenza" that I think was done in order to provide a common thread through the work but struck me as too cute
3. Attempt to find irony in the redirection of military resources from trying to kill Germans so the Germans don't kill Americans to trying to kill small organisms so that the small organisms don't kill Americans, via framing "killing Germans" as "fighting to kill" and "killing small organisms" as "fighting to save lives". These are not really opposite things.
That is really all I have to complain about, and it is more than outweighed by all the gory details of various cities' infrastructures being completely unable to deal with the sudden massive uptick in corpses (particularly since funeral directors and gravediggers and such were also dying in great numbers). There are even several pages of disturbing pictures!
Morbid tidbit: One of the really scary things about this flu (which is also one of the really scary things about AIDS) was that it disproportionately targeted young adults, who usually have the best immune systems, and when the young adults got it, they tended to die the fastest and most painfully, and the doctors would find that their lungs were literally torn up. This turns out to be because the virus triggered a massive and indiscriminate immune system reaction, and the waste from this reaction would get deposited into the spaces between the alveoli of the lungs, tearing the lungs apart and killing the victim.
Other morbid tidbit: There is some evidence, much of it anecdotal, that Spanish influenza sometimes may have caused neurological issues in survivors.
There are many additional morbid tidbits available in the book, if you are interested in that sort of thing.