Well researched account of the 1918 influenza pandemic. This is the best book that I've read on this topic so far. ( )

I read this book specifically because of my PhD, as I'm looking at contexts in San Francisco around this time. There is a whole chapter on the situation in San Francisco which is great. I was also excited about the focus on the pandemic as "forgotten" which ties in to some of what I'm writing about. However, Crosby never really puts forward an argument as to why the pandemic was forgotten. There is a lot of evidence and some speculation that adds up to nothing much but evidence and speculation, and which is also seemingly tacked onto the end instead of weaved throughout the book. From the title and the opening I was hoping for more focus on the element of forgotten trauma on the American public body. Still, this is the revised edition of one of the first histories of a forgotten topic, and often an interesting read. ( )

Absolutely vital reading for the current COVID-19 pandemic. The number of parallels are very disturbing. ( )

A reviewer of this book years ago started his review with this: "I think this book is complimentary to Gina Kolata's work on the same topic." And it's interesting because I was going to say basically the same thing, which would have looked stupid, so I'm glad I read through some reviews. That said, I do think Kolata's book is the better one, possibly more interesting to me personally, although I agree with the reviewer in thinking they compliment each other well. As I write this, it's March 2020 and the world is experiencing its first major pandemic since that one, and to this point, the similarities are eery. However, I think it would help people have some context as well as a glimpse of the probable future, no matter how grim, so I definitely recommend anyone looking at this at the time of my writing this invest in researching and reading this book, Gina's "Flu" or others like them, because I think it's important to educate ourselves in light of the present situation. Hence, recommended. ( )

This is a medium-technical work (no details about how viruses work, but lots of charts, tables and footnotes) yet still manages to be an engaging read. Author Alfred Crosby notes that there were actually three waves of “flu” that year: a relatively mild outbreak in the spring followed by two massive disease waves in the fall and winter. It’s not clear whether the particular strain of flu was nastier than usual; the world had the bad luck to have a whole lot of young men in cramped quarters in military camps and naval vessels (not to mention the bad luck of being at war, of course).


As far as epidemics go, we’re not talking the Black Death here; it seems like about 25% of the population of the US caught the flu, and about 8% of those infected died (and there were probably many cases that were mild enough not to be diagnosed, so the real death rate was even smaller). Nevertheless, it was bad enough. The flu’s propensity for turning a victim’s immune system against him or her made for an unusual fatality distribution; while most diseases take the young and the old, fully 45% of flu fatalities were aged 25-45. The US Army’s influenza deaths during the war were 80% of its combat deaths.


Crosby speculates the flu may have had a great affect on the outcome of the war and the outcome of the peace. Luddendorf later claimed that the Kaiserschlact of 1918 would have been successful if so many of his troops hadn’t been sick; at the Versailles conference, Woodrow Wilson and his chief of staff, Edward House, both had the flu during the talks. (I think I can forgive Wilson a little knowing that; Crosby even suggests that Wilson may have suffered a “ministroke” while ill, as witnesses said his post-flu personality seemed to be different from the pre-flu one).


The causative organism wasn’t pinned down until the 1930s. For a long time it was thought that the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae was responsible, since it was found in a great many of the victims – but it couldn’t be made to satisfy Koch’s Postulates. The viral agent was finally tracked down by one of those common medical coincidences – a veterinary team in England looking for the cause of canine distemper discovered that ferrets could get the flu. Ferrets, of course, are not the world’s best experimental animal, but they are certainly better than (say) giraffes, and the veterinary team could demonstrate Kock’s Postulates with ferret nasal mucus through 100-or so generations of animals. This didn’t answer the question of why the 1918 strain was so nasty, but at least it eventually made vaccines possible.


Crosby closes with an interesting question – why is the 1918 flu “forgotten”, and makes some interesting suggestions. For one thing, simply because the flu took so many young people, nobody really famous died of it – although, tragically, a number of children of famous people did. And, since there was a war on, the deaths of so many young people were “diluted”; then after the war everybody was ready to forget about the whole thing. Not quite everybody; my great uncle once told me about going to several funerals a week at his church in 1918.


Well worth a read. I notice there are a number of flu books out; I’ll have to compare and contrast. I just happened to pick this one up first. ( )