Quotes from John M. Barry

The Board of Health pleaded for help from retired nurses and doctors if they remembered "even a little" of their profession.

In China the wind was originally regarded as a demon that caused illness

in New York State coughing or sneezing without covering the face was now punishable by a year in jail and a $500 fine

They had not done the wild things that had no basis in their understanding of the workings of the body. They had not given quinine or typhoid vaccine to influenza victims in the wild hope that because it worked against malaria or typhoid it might work against influenza.

Yet the story of the 1918 influenza virus is not simply one of havoc, death, and desolation, of a society fighting a war against nature superimposed on a war against another human society. It is also a story of science, of discovery, of how one thinks, and of how one changes the way one thinks, of how amidst near-utter chaos a few men sought the coolness of contemplation, the utter calm that precedes not philosophizing but grim, determined action.

how individuals explore nature—how one does science. And the way one goes about answering a question, one's methodology, matters as much as the question itself. For the method of inquiry underlies knowledge and often determines what one discovers: how one pursues a question often dictates, or at least limits, the answer.

Pandemics often come in waves, and the cumulative "morbidity" rate—the number of people who get sick in all the waves combined—often exceeds 50 percent. One virologist considers influenza so infectious that he calls it "a special instance" among infectious diseases, "transmitted so effectively that it exhausts the supply of susceptible hosts.

The lowest estimate of the pandemic's worldwide death toll is twenty-one million, in a world with a population less than one-third today's. That estimate comes from a contemporary study of the disease and newspapers have often cited it since, but it is almost certainly wrong. Epidemiologists today estimate that influenza likely caused at least fifty million deaths worldwide, and possibly as many as one hundred million.