Well, a pandemic might not be the best time to read about another pandemic or maybe it is. I am not sure if I feel encouraged or discouraged by reading this book. But I feel that one thing that stood out to me was societies general distrust with medicine. The first doctors were crackpots but once medicine became a scientific practice doctors still faced distrust. People, especially religious groups, were warning against vaccines, discrediting germ theory, and blaming most sicknesses on the downfall of man. The general public’s need to doubt medical and scientific professionals (and education professionals as well) was one of the largest reasons that this pandemic lasted so long. I fear that history is repeating itself with our general public’s views of Covid-19.
In spring of 1918, World War I was underway, and troops at Fort Riley, Kansas, found themselves felled by influenza. By the summer of 1918, the second wave struck as a highly contagious and lethal epidemic and within weeks exploded into a pandemic, an illness that travels rapidly from one continent to another. It would impact the course of the war, and kill many millions more soldiers than warfare itself.
Knopf Books for Young Readers, Amazon
Of all diseases, the 1918 flu was by far the worst that has ever afflicted humankind; not even the Black Death of the Middle Ages comes close in terms of the number of lives it took. No war, no natural disaster, no famine has claimed so many. In the space of eighteen months in 1918-1919, about 500 million people–one-third of the global population at the time–came down with influenza. The exact total of lives lost will never be known, but the best estimate is between 50 and 100 million.
In this powerful book, filled with black and white photographs, nonfiction master Albert Marrin examines the history, science, and impact of this great scourge–and the possibility for another worldwide pandemic today.
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