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The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History
Unavailable
The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History
Unavailable
The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History
Audiobook19 hours

The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

Written by John M. Barry

Narrated by Scott Brick

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

In the winter of 1918, at the height of World War I, history's most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision between modern science and epidemic disease. Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research, THE GREAT INFLUENZA weaves together multiple narratives, with characters ranging from William Welch, founder of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, to John D. Rockefeller and Woodrow Wilson. Ultimately a tale of triumph amid tragedy, this crisis provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon.


From the Compact Disc edition.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 16, 2006
ISBN9780786581795
Unavailable
The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History
Author

John M. Barry

John M. Barry is the author of Rising Tide, The Ambition and the Power: A True Story of Washington, and co-author of The Transformed Cell, which has been published in twelve languages. As Washington editor of Dunn's Review, he covered national politics, and he has also written for The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and Sports Illustrated. He lives in New Orleans and Washington, D.C.

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Rating: 4.071428571428571 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This made me search my soul to think what I would do, how I will work to help to the best of my ability, when and if another influenza pandemic appears like the one in 1918. Fancinating. Educational. A real page turner
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I have tried to read this books many years ago after thoroughly enjoying Gina Kolata's "Flu", but couldn't get through it. Now, hopefully more mature and patient, and also used to very long audiobooks and as a huge fan of narrator Scott Brick I thought to give it another try.
    Well, the book is not very well organized and appears patchy, at times long-winding and somewhat repetitive, we get a lot of general medical history before coming to the flu, and especially the portraits of American researchers seem to be a bit on the hagiographic side. The author jumps back and forth in history, introducing quite a lot of protagonists.
    Nevertheless it is an interesting book that manages to bring the extraordinary times of the influenza, WW1, the Wilson Administration, scientific breakthroughs to life. One has to fight to continue sometimes, but it is worth it.


  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I read the audiobook version of The Great Influenza which always leaves me flailing when it comes time to leave a review. The short version is: I really loved this book.

    The title describes a very specific, narrow subject - the influenza pandemic of 1918 - but the book itself is sprawling and vast. It starts with the arrival of scientific medicine on American shores, chronicling the terrible state of medical education and practice here in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and delves into the personalities of the doctors who stepped in to turn things around.

    The fledgling universities and researchers are tested with the arrival of the influenza. That context alone was amazing and fascinating. But John M. Barry traces the emergence of the disease, its arrival in military cantonments, the ways that World War I helped to spread the disease - not just because the soldiers moving between camps and overseas carried the virus from place to place but because the war ensured a shortage of doctors and nurses, because the war justified widespread censorship of the newspapers, because the war encouraged authority figures to quell panic rather than take necessary steps that could halt the spread of disease.

    There is tons of local color here, and it can be pretty gruesome. Corpses in the streets, shortages of coffins, undertakers who wouldn't go anywhere near bodies. Hospitals strained beyond capacity, stubborn officials who hold parades after being warned not to, false advertisments - like from Vicks Vap-o-Rub - promising to cure influenza. The result isn't just a picture of a particularly virulent strain of influenza, it's also a snapshot of our country under stress, of people who respond heroically and others who act like cowards.

    The final death toll is astonishing - upwards of 100 million people died around the world. And the afterword is full of warnings about the inevitability of a new influenza pandemic, and how totally unprepared we'd be.

    The final chapters cover the post-mortem; the doctors who living and working during the pandemic never discovered its source because they were searching for a bacteria. It took years of subsequent investigation before influenza was identified as a virus.

    I didn't like the narrator of the audiobook. His voice was too smooth and lulling. Barry repeats the phrase "only influenza" throughout the book, driving home what a mistake it is to dismiss or overlook the threat of influenza. It's an effective technique and I appreciated it, but I really got to dread the particular tone of voice with which the narrator would say "only influenza."

    Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Bit slow, and could use a good editor. A merely adequate history of one of the greatest epidemics in history.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    John M. Barry’s enjoyable, if meandering tome “The Great Influenza” thoroughly and assiduously breaks down the history of nineteenth century medicine and the role it played in trying to stem the outbreak of influenza in 1918. Barry’s narrative is, at times, thrilling. But the book is so overfilled with information, both relevant and superfluous, that the compelling bits get lost in a sea of trivia.Despite “The Great Influenza’s” girth, there is a thrilling story here. Barry traces the influenza’s origin to pig farms in Haskell County, Kansas, following its path to Fort Riley, Kansas and, from there, to the rest of the United States and the world. Barry’s main argument is that the confluence of a new and extremely virulent strain of “only influenza” with the waning months of World War I led to a far greater crisis in two ways. First, the Sedition Act of 1918 led most American newspapers to downplay the significance of the flu outbreak for fear of hurting troop and civilian morale. Most European countries did the same. In a surprising twist, Barry argues, this is the very reason the 1918 flu pandemic became known as the “Spanish Flu.” Spain was not hit particularly hard by the flu, but they had remained neutral during the war and, thus, still had a neutral press capable of reporting on the flu, especially the incredibly serious case of King Alfonso XIII. This refusal to acknowledge the extent of the crisis resulted in more people becoming infected and dying that would have had they been willing to treat the epidemic as a true medical emergency.The second way in which World War I exacerbated the influenza outbreak was by requiring the movement of thousands of people throughout the world. Normally, influenza spreads more slowly than it did in 1918 because when people are sick, they stay home. In war, however, the sick brought off the battle lines to the hospital, infecting people all along the way. And with a strain as virulent as this was, that meant hundreds and thousands of people becoming unnecessarily infected.When separated from the chaff, Barry’s narrative is well-constructed and well-told. Unfortunately, there is a lot of chaff. Barry seems to suffer from a terrible case of what William Badke terms “the bulge,” or an inability to admit that a piece of information which was well-researched and time-consuming to prepare does not fit with the greater whole. The worst example of this is Barry’s fascination with a relatively unimportant scientific researcher named Paul Lewis. Lewis is, perhaps, best known for incorrectly declaring that influenza was caused by bacillus bacteria. But Barry follows his career with intense interest, following every lab failure and contract offer (all declined) along with his many personal failings. Lewis was, apparently, a brilliant scientist who nonetheless could never make a true breakthrough. Barry follows his story relentlessly despite Lewis failing to contribute anything noteworthy (and correct) to the study of influenza, with the exception of his training of Richard Shope, the man who would eventually isolate the Influenza A virus two years after Lewis’s death. Yet Barry is fixated on this relatively meaningless man’s story, it seems, so he can follow him to his death from another disease he was studying, yellow fever, so he can come to the superficially poignant conclusion that Dr. Paul Lewis was “the last victim of the 1918 pandemic.” Also largely irrelevant was Barry’s dissection of the 19th century history of American medicine which, while consuming the first 80 pages of the book, culminates in the discovery of a cure for diphtheria and the declaration that “scientific medicine had developed technologies that could both prevent and cure diseases that had previously killed in huge numbers, and killed gruesomely (p. 71). This might have been an important discussion had it related to the 1918 influenza but, as it turns out, scientists were completely unable to isolate the cause of the flu, much less prevent or cure it. None of this matters except to establish the institutions that would ultimately hire the scientists who tried to stop the Great Influenza.There are really two different stories here: A thrilling narrative of the 1918 influenza and its impact on the world then and now and a history of American medicine from 1950-1940. The former is gripping and a must-read. The latter could be interesting and told well in its own way, but here only serves to keep the reader away from the far more compelling story being told. Unfortunately, Barry’s lack of focus keeps a good book from being great.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    John Barry does it again with The Great Influenza. Turning a historical event into what could be a magnificent mini series or a night mare reality that could be front page news today.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An intertwined story of the anguish of the Great 1918 Influenza Epidemic and of the work of medical scientists of the time to to try to find a way to prevent or cure the disease. The medical science side of the story drags just a little and that is why this book only gets 4 stars instead of five.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Covering a couple of very interesting topics - the 1918 influenza pandemic, and the rebirth of American medicine - Barry has a lot of material to work with and distill. The book starts off well, with background on the state of American medicine in the years before the pandemic and some of the scientists who would tirelessly pursue the causes of influenza.Equally intriguing are the sections that talk about how the pandemic likely got started and spread. It reads a lot like Stephen King's The Stand, as the disease is passed from person to person. I found it enlightening to learn the role World War I had in the pandemic, aside from the obvious means to transmit the disease around the world. Propaganda and constant worry about "lowering morale" led to secrecy and outright lies about the severity of the outbreak, which in turn led to more deaths.Those are the good things - the bad really revolve around the writing. It was often repetitive, and sometimes confusing. If it had been edited more thoroughly, it would have been both shorter and more involving.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Interesting and very well-written!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I gave up 75% of the way through. The writing is not very good and I became bored, my mind kept wandering away. Barry under-delivered on promises of drama, and assumed readers understood cellular biology. He could have emphasized and repeated key points, while paring back rambling fact-filled tangents that blunted his narrative underneath a mountain of research. If he had used a braided narrative the pandemic could have started at the beginning of the book instead of frustratingly 1/3 of the way in. The are many bad pandemic histories, for example no one has yet written a good book on the Black Death. It's a difficult topic to do well.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I owned this book for quite awhile before I got a chance to read it. I studied the Great Influenza while getting my master's degree so I already knew a lot about that portion of our history, but this book still brought the sory to me in a new way and I learned more about the beginnings of the pandemic. It gives the history of medical science, and sometimes it can get a bit dense. This is a good read for people who are interested in this subject, or American history in general. It provides a great deal of information and tells it in a dramatic, captivating way. I enjoyed reading it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Good book, well researched. I enjoyed the way he focused on the researcher's. It tie's the history of the epidemic to the history of US medicine of the period.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An interesting story ruined by the overblown style. Like watching documentary footage with a voiceover by Movie Trailer Man. Also, for some reason the author decided to tie the history of the epidemic to the history of US medicine in the period (and preceding 30 years). This would have made sense if the changes in medical practice and research had had any effect on the course of the epidemic, but it didn't. Researchers were helpless, doctors were helpless, and public health advice (to the limited extent that it would have been useful) was ignored because it would have been bad for morale in wartime. So we didn't really need to spend the first section of the book learning about the foundation of the Rockefeller Institute or the biographies of the researchers who weren't able to do anything about the disease.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    great book. well researched. i enjoyed the way he focused on the researchers.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Brilliant. Along with "Rising Tide," he has established a standard for history as story, a damn good story. History books should be written like this for high schools.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very dense. Some parts (the history of American medical training at the turn of the 20th century) are fascinating. a majority seems to comprise a confusing array of researcher biographies. I would have liked to have read more about the societal reaction and changes regarding this massive worldwide plague.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Good information especially at this time with the H1N1 novel influenza pandemic going on. Author was repetitive, and skipped around alot. I wasn't expecting the book to focus so much on the actual scientists, many times focusing more on their interactions between each other than on the work they were actually doing. The final "afterward" chapter was the most interesting, which was disappointing.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was a very good book, nonfiction, about the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic, one of the worst epidemics in written history. The influenza pandemic has been strangely lost in public consciousness but it bears thinking about - it's the same virus (H1N1) that caused the Swine Flu break out a few months ago.This book presents the science and the sociology of the pandemic in conjunction with the history of medical advancement leading up to it. The primary approach is that of the history of medical science; the influenza outbreak occurred shortly after American medicine had established itself in something like its current form and presented it with a severe test. The cast of characters is largely made up of important scientists, and discusses the advances they made before, during, and because of the disease.Other aspects of the pandemic are also included. The parts that I found most interesting concerned the sociology of why and how the pandemic spread. The outbreak occurred just after the US had entered World War I, and troop movements, the lack of civilian doctors and nurses, war-time propaganda campaigns, and, of course, the pig-headedness of the officials in charge all played enormous rolls in the course of the disease.Overall I found the book very good. The descriptions of the actual disease and conditions during the pandemic were suitably horrifying, and the discussion of causes and effects I found very interesting. I have a few academic quibbles with the author's representation, however. There were a few places where I felt he made rather serious and unsubstantiated claims seemingly to enhance the significance of the pandemic, and he had the annoying habit of comparing statistics that didn't match (deaths per week compared to deaths per day, that kind of thing), I think towards that same end. All of that derives from the author's intention to tell a coherent story (as opposed to representing a scholarly debate), but be aware of that if you read the book. Overall enjoyable, but definitely not a light read. 4 stars.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book is close to being a horror novel. The first half sets the scene - the United States medical world in the decades prior to 1918, and how it was quickly professionalizing. It details the effects of the US finally joining the First World War on that medical world, denuding the country of doctors and nurses. The second half describes influenza, the particular H1N1 type that constituted the Spanish Flu, and the impacts of the influenza epidemic on the US. The death toll was staggering, and even more staggering was the speed of onset. Only by reading this book do I understand the work going on now regarding our current H1N1 virus in public health groups around the world. While it is currently mild, the virus has crossed the important barrier of being able to move from person to person. All that remains is the relatively minor mutation to become more lethal. Scary stuff.John Barry can write, but a tighter edit would have helped. He seemed to repeat himself in places, adding to the length of the book, never a good thing. I recommend this as a good introduction to a layman, like me, to epidemiology and the specific story of the 1918 flu.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This one was rough going initially. The expectation going in is that this is a book about the 1918 flu pandemic, but to get there Barry begins with a long (and somewhat tedious) history of medical education in the United States. This is not without its merits, but it’s also not exactly what I was expecting. Once the story get rolling, however, there’s plenty of fascinating and intriguing stuff here. Overall, this is a great book for anyone who considers the flu to be little more than a passing irritation – or who thinks that the medical community has effectively cured its more malevolent strains. With the current outbreak of a new strain in Mexico (the “swine flu”), the lessons of 1918 carry a renewed urgency. Even if people don’t read this whole book, it will be valuable to reawaken a consciousness of the lethality of influenza.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I think my first reaction to this book was to decide that I was going to get a flu shot for the first time in my life. Barry's work, which is excellent, looks first at the history of medicine and medical training in the US up through 1918, then at how the 1918 influenza outbreak was able to move across the world so quickly, then finally, how scientists worked to find a cure so that they could help to stem the tide of the epidemic before it caused more deaths. It was incredibly well written, to the point where someone like me (who has the opposite brain side to the one that can understand science) could totally comprehend what he was saying. He did not bog the reader down with incomprehensible jargon, nor did he drone on and on about any particular subject but instead kept things very readable and varied, while all the time sticking to his topic. One thing I found incredibly interesting was the author's discussion about factors leading to the sheer amount of devastation caused by the outbreak when it came, all starting with Woodrow Wilson. He cites Wilson's focus on patriotism and how he kept anything remotely negative out of the papers (and also his appointment of Creel as the head of the Committee on Public Information, whose job it was to weed out anyone who might disagree with the government's position). Barry also discussed the Red Cross and its refusal to advocate the training of practical nurses prior to the outbreak because practical nurses "seriously threatened the status of professional training and nursing" (142). Another factor was the military's appropriation of the best doctors and nurses. This was all before the outbreak of influenza in 1918, and the worst was yet to be. This book was extremely readable, very focused and quite informative. It was also a bit frightening -- who knows what governments are keeping the lid on nowadays in the realm of medicine and health issues. I'd definitely recommend it to people who may be interested in the topic.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm glad I didn't live in 1918.This book told the story of the 1918 Influenza virus, which it says killed up to 100 million people worldwide in 24 weeks.That's alot for today's population. For the population of 1918 (with 1.8 billion people) that's a big roll of the dice to hope to live through.I take two pieces of advice from this book: *If you're running the administration that's going through a pandemic, be upfront about it. The Wilson administration was fighting World War I, and didn't want to hurt morale by talking straight about how deadly the pandemic was. That just caused more panic.*Get a flu shot. They're not even close to foolproof, but when they're targeted correctly, they're effective.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In "The Great Influenza," John Barry provides a fascinating, thorough, informative and accessible window into the great flu pandemic of 1918 that ravaged the United States and much of the western world. Barry deftly sets the background leading up to the outbreak. This includes the major figures and state of medicine during that pioneering era nearly 100 years ago.Barry notes how, while a handful of physicians and scientists in the world, particularly in western Europe, knew of the germ and cellular theories, by enlarge, most of the medical community in the world still operated on a largely antiquated, inaccurate understanding of medicine and disease. He notes how, up until the late 19th century, almost anyone could get a medical degree and practice medicine, and only a handful of medical schools, like Harvard, and Johns Hopkins had a rigorously clinical model of medicine.Barry traces the confluence of the developing understanding of disease and cellular theory in that day with the outbreak and rapid spread of the virulent influenza of 1918. Thousands of young adults were grouped together in very close quarters while training and preparing to deploy to World War I. This environment proved to be conducive to the rapid spread of a deadly strain of influenza that spread through military barracks, out to the surrounding community, on to much of the country, and eventually much of the western world in the course of a number of months.As this alarming pattern of severe illness, and in many cases, death of the particularly young and old emerged, several medical leaders of the day, began to take action. This included the U.S. surgeon general and chief surgeon of the Army. Their proactive measures, including initiating quarantines, strict sanitation, and early, basic attempts at vaccination, while unable to prevent an epidemic, saved countless lives.This was also a crucial turning point in American medicine, Barry points out, that led to a national and international movement to raise standards for medical training. An increased emphasis on clinical training and better understanding of cellular theory, viruses, and epidemiology also resulted. Medical care advanced by leaps and bounds as a result.Still, the stories and chilling photos of hundreds upon hundreds of bodies being stacked in the streets and left in abandoned homes in major American cities at the height of the outbreak give one pause. In his epilogue, Barry also looks ahead to the next global pandemic from a perspective of not 'if' but rather 'when' it occurs. His predictions about the spread of virulent strains of flu, such as H151, as well as other multi-drug resistant organisms are eerily prescient given recent news of the increased prevalence of such viruses.Overall Barry's book "The Great Influenza" is very readable, informative, engaging and an incredible work of historical and clinical scholarship. Very highly recommended!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Easy to read. The background on medicine in the US was surprising. The book presented all material in an easy to read style that is understandable by the average lay person. Food for thought on what could happen in the near future.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    so many lessons for today.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It's an interesting book, but it promised more than it delivered (and was quite long into the bargain).It certainly told me a lot about flu, the flu virus and made you very aware that a pandemic in the modern world would be extremely bad (our just-in-time production mentality for example means there is little slack in the system if large chunks of the workforce were to fall ill).It also gives a good story of the triumph of scientific approaches to disease control (especially in the US, which went from being relatively backwards in the late 19th century, to being a world leader by the time of the first world war). How this scientific elite did (and didn't) respond to the flu pandemic, how the political leadership did (and didn't) help and how this played out are the main parts of this book, offset too against how they dealt with the USA's surprise entry into the First World War.There are some interesting anecdotes (as well as some terrifying descriptions of the spread of the illness), including the suggestion that Woodrow Wilson may have suffered minor flu symptoms while negotiating the Versailles treaty in 1919, thus affecting his judgement. A good solid read, but it did not grab me as much as I expected.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    As one who rarely reads nonfiction, this was a treat. I've always been fascinated with disease and epidemics. This wonderfully and horrifingly paints the picture of life during the Spanish Flu pandemic, as well as giving a fantastic portrait of the doctors and scientists who worked at the time to stave it off.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A little long, but still quite interesting to me.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Readable and generally excellent account of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Barry is particularly effective in describing the efforts of scientists striving to understand the causes of the pandemic. His analysis of the social impacts is solid but less compelling. The first 80 pages provides an exceptionally concise history of medical science u to 1918.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    While the pedigrees and biographical information about the various scientists profiled in this work became quite tedious at times, the overall pace of this book is gripping. This is very readable and layman-friendly non-fiction, and a great follow-up to the debut novel "The Last Town in America."