Quotes from John M. Barry

Oliver Wendell Holmes, the physician father of the Supreme Court justice, was not much overstating when he declared, "I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind—and all the worse for the fishes.

began using that door. In 1880 Pasteur—who observed, "Chance favors the prepared mind"—

In the United States, the story is particularly one of a handful of extraordinary people, of whom Paul Lewis is one.

Corpses were wrapped in sheets, pushed into corners, left there sometimes for days, the horror of it sinking in deeper each hour, people too sick to cook for themselves, too sick to clean themselves, too sick to move the corpse off the bed, lying alive on the same bed with the corpse. The dead lay there for days, while the living lived with them, were horrified by them, and, perhaps most horribly, became accustomed to them.

People were dying like flies

To contribute to the war effort, citizens across the country endured the "meatless days" during the week, the one "wheatless meal" every day.

The disease has survived in memory more than in any literature. Nearly all those who were adults during the pandemic have died now. Now the memory lives in the minds of those who only heard stories, who heard how their mother lost her father, how an uncle became an orphan, or heard an aunt say, "It was the only time I ever saw my father cry." Memory dies with people. The writers of the 1920s had little to say about it.

The elderly, normally the group most susceptible to influenza, not only survived attacks of the disease but were attacked far less often. This resistance of the elderly was a worldwide phenomenon. The most likely explanation is that an earlier pandemic , so mild as to not attract attention, resembled the 1918 virus closely enough that it provided protection. (p. 408 paperback edition)

After the Civil War, America continued to churn out prophets of new, simple, complete, and self-contained systems of healing, two of which, chiropractic and Christian Science, survive today. (Evidence does suggest that spinal manipulation can relieve musculoskeletal conditions, but no evidence supports chiropractic claims that disease is caused by misalignment of vertebrae.)

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. Others had done these things and more, but they had not.

In the whole the face of things, as I say, was much altered; sorrow and sadness sat upon every face; and though some parts were not yet overwhelmed, yet all looked deeply concerned; and as we saw it apparently coming on, so every one looked on himself and his family as in the utmost danger.

H1N1 virus of 1918, the virus that created its own killing fields.

Since the respiratory tract must allow outside air to pass into the innermost recesses of the body, it is extremely well defended. The lungs became the battleground between the invaders and the immune system. Nothing was left standing on that battleground.

And the reluctance, inability, or outright refusal of the American government to shift targets would contribute to the killing. Wilson took no public note of the disease, and the thrust of the government was not diverted.

From neither the White House nor any other senior administration post would there come any leadership, any attempt to set priorities, any attempt to coordinate activities, any attempt to deliver resources.

The federal government was giving no guidance that a reasoning person could credit. Few local governments did better. They left a vacuum. Fear filled it. The government's very efforts to preserve "morale" fostered the fear, for since the war began, morale—defined in the narrowest, most shortsighted fashion—had taken precedence in every public utterance. As California senator Hiram Johnson said in 1917, "The first casualty when war comes is truth.

Only on May 23, 1918, had Provost Marshal Enoch Crowder, who oversaw the draft, issued his "work or fight" order, stating that anyone not employed in an essential industry would be drafted—an order that caused major league baseball to shorten its season and sent many ballplayers scurrying for jobs that were "essential"—and promising that "all men within the enlarged age would be called within a year.

Man might defined as modern largely to the extent that he attempts to control, as opposed to adjust himself to, nature.

To have any chance in alleviating the devastation of the epidemic required organization, coordination, implementation. It required leadership and it required that institutions follow that leadership.

To sell war bonds, they had already organized nearly the entire city, all the way down to the level of each block, making each residential block the responsibility of "a logical leader no matter what her nationality"—i.e., an Irishwoman in an Irish neighborhood, an African American woman in an African American neighborhood, and so on. They intended to use that same organization now to distribute everything from medical care to food.

Horizontal vision allows someone to assimilate and weave together seemingly unconnected bits of information. It allows an investigator to see what others do not see, and to make leaps of connectivity and creativity.

Influenza is a viral disease. When it kills, it usually does so in one of two ways: either quickly and directly with a violent viral pneumonia so damaging that it has been compared to burning the lungs; or more slowly and indirectly by stripping the body of defenses, allowing bacteria to invade the lungs and cause a more common and slower-killing bacterial pneumonia.

Desperate efforts were being made to protect troops from the disease, or at least prevent complications. Germicidal solutions were sprayed into the mouths and noses of troops. Soldiers were ordered to use germicidal mouthwash and to gargle twice a day. Iodine in glycerin was tried in an attempt to disinfect mouths. Vaseline containing menthol was used in nasal passages, mouths washed with liquid albolene.

There are limits to such manipulation. Even under torture, nature will not lie, will not yield a consistent, reproducible result, unless it is true. But if tortured enough, nature will mislead; it will confess to something that is true only under special conditions—the conditions the investigator created in the laboratory. Its truth is then artificial, an experimental artifact.