Quotes from John M. Barry

Epidemiological evidence suggests that a new influenza virus originated in Haskell County, Kansas, early in 1918. Evidence further suggests that this virus traveled east across the state to a huge army base, and from there to Europe. Later it began its sweep through North America, through Europe, through South America, through Asia and Africa, through isolated islands in the Pacific, through all the wide world.

In ten days—ten days!—the epidemic had exploded from a few hundred civilian cases and one or two deaths a day to hundreds of thousands ill and hundreds of deaths each day.

Monument and Ignacio, Colorado, went further than banning all public gatherings. They banned customers from stores; the stores remained open, but customers shouted orders through doors, then waited outside for packages.

Which raises another question: How does one know when one knows? In turn this leads to more practical questions: How does one know when to continue to push an experiment? And how does one know when to abandon a clue as a false trail?

The nest of college-birds are three, / Law, Physic and Divinity; / And while these three remain combined, / They keep the world oppressed and blind / . . . Now is the time to be set free, / From priests' and Doctors' slavery.

most important lesson for every man of science, not to be satisfied with loose thinking and half-proofs, not to speculate and theorize but to observe closely and carefully.

He was saying that mixing church and state corrupted the church. He was saying that when one mixes religion and politics one gets politics.

In 2003 a new coronavirus that causes SARS, "severe acute respiratory syndrome," appeared in China and quickly spread around the world. Coronaviruses cause an estimated 15 to 30 percent of all colds and, like the influenza virus, infect epithelial cells. When the coronavirus that causes SARS does kill, it often kills through ARDS, although since the virus replicates much more slowly than influenza, death from ARDS can come several weeks after the first symptoms.)

Thomsonism was the most popular layman's medical movement but hardly the only one. Dozens of what can only be called sects arose across the countryside. A Thomsonian rhyme summed up the attitude: "The nest of college-birds are three, / Law, Physic and Divinity; / And while these three remain combined, / They keep the world oppressed and blind / . . . Now is the

striving to replace it to some extent by this image. This is what the painter does, and the poet, the speculative

All influenza viruses mutate constantly

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.

Uncertainty follows distrust, fear follows uncertainty, and, under conditions such as these, terror follows fear.

if it believes that it knows the truth and that it need not question its beliefs, then that society is more likely to enforce rigid decrees, and less likely to change. If it leaves room for doubt about the truth, it is more likely to be free and open. In

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.

They read the words of Colonel Philip Doane, the officer in charge of health at the country's shipyards, who told the Associated Press, "The so-called Spanish influenza is nothing more or less than old-fashioned grippe.

the germ theory said that minute living organisms invaded the body, multiplied, and caused disease, and that a specific germ caused a specific disease.

Nature answers only when she is questioned.

They try to order chaos not in the way an artist or scientist does, through a defining vision that creates structure and discipline, but by closing off and isolating themselves from that which does not fit. They become bureaucratic.

most scientific rival of the germ theory explained disease in terms purely of chemistry. It saw disease as a chemical process.

virus has only one function: to replicate itself.

In 1918, the world population was 1.8 billion, and the pandemic probably killed 50 to 100 million people, with the lowest credible modern estimate at 35 million. Today the world population is 7.6 billion. A comparable death toll today would range from roughly 150 to 425 million.

So the final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that those who occupy positions of authority must lessen the panic that can alienate all within a society. Society cannot function if it is every man for himself. By definition, civilization cannot survive that. Those in authority must retain the public's trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best.

And a severe influenza pandemic would hit like a tsunami, inundating intensive-care units even as doctors and nurses fall ill themselves and generally pushing the health care system to the point of collapse and possibly beyond it. Hospitals, like every other industry, have gotten more efficient by cutting costs, which means virtually no excess capacity—on a per capita basis the United States has far fewer hospital beds than a few decades ago.