Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Pale Rider
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.lauraspinney.com/
CITY: Paris
STATE:
COUNTRY: France
NATIONALITY: British
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/22/pale-rider-laura-spinney-review
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2001046140
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2001046140
HEADING: Spinney, Laura
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PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author, science writer, and journalist.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Science writer Laura Spinney is the author of the history Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, which tells the story of the first pandemic of the twentieth century. “Coolly, crisply and with a consistently sharp eye for the telling anecdote,” reported John Preston, writing in the Daily Mail, “Spinney shows how flu has been around in one guise or another since the 16th century–the word ‘influenza’ was coined by the Italians who attributed the disease to the influence of the stars.” “The estimated number of deaths resulting from [the 1918-20] … illness,” stated Booklist reviewer Tony Miksanek, “ranges between fifty and one hundred million people.” “Laura Spinney’s book,” explained Gavin Francis in the London Review of Books, “attempts to collate what is known about the pandemic, and takes a stab at examining its legacy: ‘The flu resculpted human populations more radically than anything since the Black Death,’ she writes. ‘It influenced the course of the First World War and, arguably, contributed to the second. It pushed India closer to independence, South Africa closer to apartheid, and Switzerland to the brink of civil war. It ushered in universal healthcare and alternative medicine, our love of fresh air and our passion for sport.'” “It is curious that an event that shaped the world as much as, perhaps arguably more, than the First World War, has been so neglected by history,” stated a reviewer for Librarian on Parade. “This is a welcome addition to a thin field, and serves as a fine overview.”
One of Spinney’s major points in Pale Rider is that the Spanish flu has been largely ignored in the history of the early twentieth century. “Spinney believes the pandemic has been forgotten by most of us partly because so many deaths occurred outside Europe and North America,” explained Peter Carty in a review in the Spectator. “Accordingly, she delves into the unfolding of the tragedy around the globe, looking at Brazil, China, Iran, India and Russia. There is fascinating detail of the behaviour of diverse populaces in extremis. In a desperate attempt to stem the disease’s onslaughts, the residents of Odessa staged a ‘black wedding’–the ancient Jewish shvartze khasene ritual.” “During spring and summer, it behaved like the usual flu,” declared a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “but in fall 1918, it turned deadly and spread across the world, killing 2.5 to ten percent of victims.” “Medical science helped only modestly,” reported a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “as political considerations (including wartime censorship), tradition, and racism all trumped safeguards.” “She also demonstrates,” said Preston, “how Spanish flu cast a long, dark shadow over the 20th century. In its wake, the idea of quarantining people who were thought to pose a danger to society gained enormous popularity–thus paving the way, albeit indirectly, for the Nazi concentration camps. Even now the consequences are with us.”
Although it appears that the first cases of the 1918 flu were reported in the United States, the virus may have had its origins in other parts of the world. Recently, Spinney reveals, disease investigators have collected and experimented with tissue samples taken from the bodies of well-preserved victims to try to sequence the DNA of the virus. “Researchers now believe that the 1918 virus originated in birds, but exactly when and where it made the leap to humans remains under debate,” wrote Amanda Schaffer in the New York Times Book Review. “Spinney explores three possibilities: In March 1918, a mess cook at the United States Army’s Camp Funston in Kansas contracted the disease, possibly from a nearby farm. Yet more than a year earlier, a flulike illness had ravaged a military camp, close to the Western Front in northern France. And in 1917 an unknown respiratory disease also swept communities in Northern China.” By 1920 the devastation had spread even farther, and the consequences for vulnerable populations were dire. “In some Indian regions, six per cent of the population perished,” wrote Jon Wright in Geographical; “in parts of South Africa this rose to ten per cent.”
Even the common name of the virus reflected the geopolitics and racism of the early twentieth century, “The flu wasn’t Spanish at all,” said Francis. “The name stuck when in May 1918 the Spanish king, the prime minister and his entire cabinet all came down with it. In Madrid, it was known as the Naples Soldier after a catchy tune then in circulation, while French military doctors called it Disease 11. In Senegal it was Brazilian flu; in Brazil it was German flu. Poles called it the Bolshevik Disease and the Persians thought the British were responsible (Spinney writes about its devastating effect on the city of Mashed, where it probably arrived with a Russian soldier from the north).” “In Europe and North America the first world war killed more than Spanish flu; everywhere else the reverse is true,” said a reviewer for the Economist. “Yet most narratives focus on the West, and only partly because that is where the best records are. Ms Spinney’s book goes some way to redress the balance.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2017, Tony Miksanek, review of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, p. 23.
Daily Mail, June 1, 2017, John Preston, review of Pale Rider.
Economist, May 27, 2017, “One Hundred Million Dead; Disease in History,” p. 75.
Geographical, September, 2017, Jon Wright, review of Pale Rider, p. 66.
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2017, review of Pale Rider.
London Review of Books, January 25, 2018, Gavin Francis, “The Untreatable,” p. 3.
New York Times Book Review, December 31, 2017, Amanda Schaffer, “Disease,” p. 26.
Publishers Weekly, May 15, 2017, review of Pale Rider, p. 47.
Spectator, May 27, 2017, Peter Carty, “The Last Great Pandemic,” p. 61.
ONLINE
Librarian on Parade, http://librarianonparade.com/ (August 16, 2017), review of Pale Rider.
Print Marked Items
PALE RIDER: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and
How it Changed the World
Jon Wright
Geographical.
89.9 (Sept. 2017): p66.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Circle Publishing Ltd.
http://www.geographical.co.uk/
Full Text:
PALE RIDER: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney; Jonathan Cape;
[pounds sterling]20 (hardback)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The dreadful pandemic of 1918, writes Laura Spinney, 'engulfed the entire world in the blink of an eye.'
Pinning down figures is difficult, but estimates of the final death toll reach as high as 100 million. In Britain
and the US, losses amounted to only half a per cent of the population. Elsewhere the casualties easily
outweighed those claimed by the First World War. In some Indian regions, six per cent of the population
perished, in parts of South Africa this rose to ten per cent, and in Bristol Bay, Alaska, four out of ten people
were lost.
Until fairly recently, historians paid the Spanish Flu surprisingly little attention: perhaps, Spinney suggests,
because 'pandemic memory' takes a long time to mature. We now know much more and Spinney's book
provides a masterful account of the possible origins, spread, and cultural consequences of this modern-day
plague.
Especially interesting are the context-providing sections on humanity's millennia-old encounter with flu and
on the frantic, flawed, attempts to understand the science behind the outbreak. Back in 1918, theories
clashed about where the flu originated (almost certainly not Spain, for the record) and about how it was
transmitted, but the medical establishment was largely limited to throwing 'the medicine cabinet at the
problem.'
We have moved on, but Spinney has no doubt that another pandemic is inevitable. Lessons, she says, can be
learned from 1918 and there is some small comfort in the fact that many reacted with generosity. 'Your best
chance of survival was to be utterly selfish' - to hide away and ignore cries for help. Many did the opposite
and demonstrated noble, if foolish, 'collective resilience.'
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Wright, Jon. "PALE RIDER: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World." Geographical, Sept.
2017, p. 66. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A508323852/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9cc62558. Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A508323852
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and
How It Changed the World
Tony Miksanek
Booklist.
114.1 (Sept. 1, 2017): p23.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. By Laura Spinney. Sept. 2017. 352p.
PublicAffairs, $28 (9781610397674); e-book (9781610397681). 614.51809041.
"The greatest massacre of the twentieth century." That's how science writer Spinney describes the 1918
Spanish flu pandemic. One in three human beings around the globe was infected. From 1918 to 1920, the
estimated number of deaths resulting from this illness ranges between 50 and 100 million people. WWI
didn't initiate the Spanish flu, but war advanced its dissemination and virulence. And Spanish flu didn't even
originate in Spain. The virus is spread in aerosolized droplets dispersed via sneezing and coughing. Spinney
suggests, "Snot is a fairly effective missile." For most, the Spanish flu caused headache, sore throat, body
aches, and fever. But for many millions, the infection produced spontaneous bleeding from the mouth and
throat, blackened hands and feet, hair and teeth falling out, and death. Spinney's detailed discussion includes
the why and how, the human devastation, and the effects on institutions and world affairs. Now nearly 100
years removed from the 1918 Spanish flu, Spinney wonders what lessons it has imparted that might help us
prepare for and deal with the next, inevitable influenza pandemic. --Tony Miksanek
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Miksanek, Tony. "Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World." Booklist, 1 Sept.
2017, p. 23. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509161461/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=95489c44. Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509161461
Spinney, Laura: PALE RIDER
Kirkus Reviews.
(July 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Spinney, Laura PALE RIDER PublicAffairs (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 9, 12 ISBN: 978-1-61039-767-4
The history of "the greatest massacre of the twentieth century," an illness that infected more than 500
million people.Between 1918 and 1920, the "Spanish flu" killed more than 50 million people, far more than
in the world war then raging. Unlike the familiar flu, which targets infants and the elderly, it killed healthy
adults. It was mankind's worst epidemic, writes Paris-based science journalist and novelist Spinney (The
Quick, 2007, etc.) in this fine account of influenza's history, its worst attack (so far), and its ominous future.
Despite the name, Americans were probably the first to experience the fever, cough, headache, and general
miseries of the infection. During spring and summer, it behaved like the usual flu, but in fall 1918, it turned
deadly and spread across the world, killing 2.5 to 10 percent of victims, a fatality rate 20 times higher than
normal. Scientists have offered countless theories about the illness, but Spinney looks favorably at a recent
theory that the 1918 virus provoked a "cytokine storm," a deadly overreaction of the immune system. This
may explain why infants and the elderly, with their weaker immune systems, had an easier time. In the
middle sections of the book, the author describes how a dozen nations dealt with the epidemic. Heroism was
not in short supply, but superstition, racism, ignorance (including among doctors), and politics usually
prevailed. In the concluding section, Spinney recounts impressive scientific progress over the past century
but no breakthroughs. Revealing the entire viral genome opens many possibilities, but so far none have
emerged. Researchers are working to improve today's only modestly protective vaccine; Spinney expresses
hope. Readers who worry about Ebola, Zika, or SARS should understand that epidemiologists agree that a
recurrence of the 1918 virus would be worse. Short on optimism but a compelling, expert account of a halfforgotten
historical catastrophe.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Spinney, Laura: PALE RIDER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497199507/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f6e52d35.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497199507
The last great pandemic
Peter Carty
Spectator.
334.9848 (May 27, 2017): p61.
COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World
by Laura Spinney
Cape, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 332
The symptoms of the Spanish flu could be ghastly. Perhaps Laura Spinney should have chosen her title with
more care because rather than becoming pale and interesting, as with tuberculosis, frequently the flu's
victims turned completely black before dying. 'It is hard,' one US army doctor observed, 'to distinguish the
colored men from the white.'
The pandemic is often thought of as a forgotten catastrophe. That is despite its monumental scale. The death
toll, which peaked in the autumn of 1918, is variously estimated to be between 50 million and 100 million--
far exceeding the 17 million fatalities of the Great War. But have we really forgotten the Spanish flu--and, if
so, why?
Spinney is both a novelist and science writer. She has a knack for timing, too. Her account of the flu comes
out ahead of what is likely to be a pack of centenary volumes next year. Her book is ambitious, perhaps too
ambitious. She wishes to reappraise the pandemic from all angles: historic, scientific and cultural. A central
part of this is to examine how and why the pandemic has been remembered, or not.
Spinney points to various kinds of memory. She cites family histories, formal historical accounts and--that
nebulous beast --the collective or popular memory. It transpires that, for the first couple of these at least, the
Spanish flu is far from forgotten. Frequently, individuals are aware of relatives who died. And when it
comes to written history, Spinney gives a figure of no fewer than 400 books produced on the pandemic to
date. Admittedly, this is dwarfed by 80,000 volumes on the first world war, but interest in the flu has never
faded for historians. Indeed, you could say that writing histories of the pandemic is itself mildly endemic.
That leaves popular memory. Spinney believes the pandemic has been forgotten by most of us partly
because so many deaths occurred outside Europe and North America. Accordingly, she delves into the
unfolding of the tragedy around the globe, looking at Brazil, China, Iran, India and Russia. There is
fascinating detail of the behaviour of diverse populaces in extremis. In a desperate attempt to stem the
disease's onslaughts, the residents of Odessa staged a 'black wedding'--the ancient Jewish shvartze khasene
ritual for warding off outbreaks of infection, in which a pair of beggars were recruited for a macabre
marriage ceremony in a cemetery. In Rio de Janeiro, meanwhile, civilised constraints collapsed in the
aftermath of the pandemic's onslaughts, when revellers ran riot during the carnival of 1919 and reports of
rape surged.
Spinney also examines research into the flu's origins, again from a global perspective. She looks at theories
that the flu first emerged among British troops in the training and hospital camp at Etaples, near the Western
Front. Other contenders are rural Kansas and northern China's Shanxi province. Nevertheless, so far the only
certainty remains that wherever the Spanish flu sprang from, it was definitely not Spain.
No treatment was available other than careful nursing, though numerous purported cures and prophylactics
were touted. These included smoking and drinking which--understandably enough--proved popular. Bloodletting
was revived when it appeared to bring relief to some patients. Medical researchers got no further than
establishing that the disease was viral. At the time this was of little use, because it would not be until 1936
that the first crude flu vaccine appeared.
Spinney is strongest when she delves directly into the events of the pandemic and the medical science
around it. Elsewhere she runs into difficulties. An elliptical approach works well enough for asteroids, but is
not necessarily beneficial for historians. Her attempts to analyse the myriad potential historical effects of the
pandemic lack focus and are often tenuous. At times, she risks descending into open-ended cultural studies
discourse, complete with contestable terminology. Here and there, 'historiography' and 'the other' erupt from
her text, linguistic boils begging to be lanced.
When it comes to drawing conclusions about the pandemic's absence from folk memory, Spinney appears
overwhelmed by the sheer mass of material she has assembled. That is a shame, because most of the
evidence for solving the mystery is present in her book and it is not hard to join up the dots. As she points
out, in Britain deaths from the flu were lower per capita than for much of the rest of the world. In fact, they
were substantially lower in total than our fatalities in the first world war. Moreover, and as she reminds us,
the pandemic was far shorter in duration than the war. In sum, therefore--and while global recollections will
vary hugely--the reality is that it is far from surprising that the Spanish flu pandemic is much less well
remembered by us than the Great War.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Carty, Peter. "The last great pandemic." Spectator, 27 May 2017, p. 61. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498581959/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3a74e5d5.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498581959
One hundred million dead; Disease in
history
The Economist.
423.9042 (May 27, 2017): p75(US).
COPYRIGHT 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
Full Text:
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World. By Laura Spinney. Jonathan Cape; 282
pages. To be published in America by Public Affairs in September.
BY EARLY 1920, nearly two years after the end of the first world war and the first outbreak of Spanish flu,
the disease had killed as many as 100m people-- more than both world wars combined. Yet few would name
it as the biggest disaster of the 20th century. Some call it the "forgotten flu". Almost a century on, "Pale
Rider", a scientific and historic account of Spanish flu, addresses this collective amnesia.
Influenza, like all viruses, is a parasite. Laura Spinney traces its long shadow over human history; records
are patchy and uncertain, but Hippocrates's "Cough of Perinthus" in 412BC may be its first written
description. Influenza-shaped footprints can be traced down the centuries: the epidemic that struck during
Rome's siege of Syracuse in 212BC; the febris italica that plagued Charlemagne's troops in the ninth
century. The word "influenza" started being used towards the end of the Middle Ages from the Italian for
"influence"--the influence of the stars. That was the state of knowledge then; in some ways at the start of the
20th century it was little better.
Ms Spinney, an occasional contributor to The Economist, recreates the world that Spanish flu came into. At
the beginning of the 20th century science was on the rise. Scientists had switched miasma theory of disease
for germ theory: they understood that many diseases were caused not by "bad airs", but by microscopic
organisms like bacteria. This led to improvements in hygiene and sanitation, as well as the development of
vaccines. But viruses were almost unknown. The magnification of optical microscopes was too weak to
show them up. People could spot bacteria, but not viruses, which are smaller than the wavelength of visible
light. Until the electron microscope was invented in the 1930s, influenza was, like the Higgs boson before
2012, a theoretical entity: its existence was deduced from its effects. In the face of such uncertainty, public
faith in medicine wavered. People reverted to superstition: sugar lumps soaked in kerosene, and aromatic
fires to clear "miasmas".
Even so, Spanish flu was exceptionally deadly--about 25 times more so than seasonal flu. No one fully
understands why. Ms Spinney ties the virulence of Spanish flu to its genetic irregularities and does a good
job of explaining containment strategies through epidemiology. She draws on contemporary research, too,
including the recent controversy about recreating the strain responsible for the pandemic. Ms Spinney is
sanguine about the risks of such experiments: influenza appears to have all the ingredients for another
catastrophic pandemic and scientists, using caution, should probably do all they can to learn more about it.
Perhaps the most valuable aspect of this book, though, is its global perspective, tracing the course of the
disease in Brazil, India, South Africa and Australia, among other places. In Europe and North America the
first world war killed more than Spanish flu; everywhere else the reverse is true. Yet most narratives focus
on the West, and only partly because that is where the best records are. Ms Spinney's book goes some way
to redress the balance.
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World.
By Laura Spinney.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"One hundred million dead; Disease in history." The Economist, 27 May 2017, p. 75(US). General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492775398/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7d5afaaa.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492775398
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and
How It Changed the World
Publishers Weekly.
264.20 (May 15, 2017): p47.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World
Laura Spinney. Public Affairs, $28 (352p)
ISBN 978-1-61039-767-4
The deadliest event of 1918 was not the continued fighting of WWI but the Spanish flu, which affected one
third of the world's population, killing over 10% of its victims. This is no longer a controversial assessment,
notes science journalist Spinney (Rue Centrale) in an often disturbing account that begins in prehistory and
continues to the 21st century. It is now generally accepted that the first case of Spanish flu occurred in an
American military camp in March 1918. By May Spanish flu had spread worldwide. Symptoms (including
fever, headache, cough, and body aches) were miserable but rarely fatal, and the number of cases declined
over the summer. But it returned in autumn, far worse and deadlier. Unlike ordinary influenza, this variant
tended to kill young adults, sparing children and the elderly. Spinney's book contains vivid journalistic
accounts of outbreaks around the world, from the U.S. to China, India, and Persia. Medical science helped
only modestly, as political considerations (including wartime censorship), tradition, and racism all trumped
safeguards, as when authorities in several countries stopped the publication of details on the epidemic's
spread. Readers may squirm during Spinney's long final section--an insightful description of the subsequent
century, during which researchers have teased out the Spanish flu's cause, developed a marginally effective
vaccine, and worked to ameliorate future influenza epidemics, which are inevitable. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World." Publishers Weekly, 15 May 2017, p.
47. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492435654/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5655d190. Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492435654
Death sells
Laura Spinney
New Scientist.
181.2436 (Feb. 28, 2004): p49.
COPYRIGHT 2004 New Scientist Ltd.. For more science news and comments, see
http://www.newscientist.com.
http://www.newscientist.com/
Full Text:
Inside the Mind of a Killer by Jean-Francois Abgrall, Profile Books, 8.99 [pounds sterling], ISBN
1861976569
OTHERS have described this book flatteringly as echoing Dostoevsky, but to me Inside the Mind of a Killer
has more in common with Albert Camus's The Outsider, with its murder on a beach, pared-down dialogue,
and eyewitnesses (if not perpetrators) blinded by the sun. It's the gripping tale of the largest serial murder
hunt in French history, written by the detective who led it, Jean-Francois Abgrall. It, too, was a bestseller in
France.
Laura Spinney is a science writer
Spinney, Laura
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Spinney, Laura. "Death sells." New Scientist, 28 Feb. 2004, p. 49. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A113939397/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=79a56703.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A113939397
Dream weaver
Laura Spinney
New Scientist.
181.2437 (Mar. 6, 2004): p53.
COPYRIGHT 2004 New Scientist Ltd.. For more science news and comments, see
http://www.newscientist.com.
http://www.newscientist.com/
Full Text:
The Mind at Night: The new science of how and why we dream by Andrea Rock, Basic Books/Perseus,
$26/19.99 [pounds sterling], ISBN 0738207551
THE short answer to why and how do we dream is, we still don't know. But it is looking more and more
likely we do it ANDREA ROCK for a biologically useful reason. And memory consolidation is a prime
contender.
In The Mind at Night Andrea Rock does a good job of weaving into the story the often colourful characters
of the researchers whose work she discusses. As she does so, the domination by the US of the field since the
1950s becomes clear.
Interesting, then, to discover from her epilogue that much of the most innovative work on dreaming is now
going on in Canada and Europe, while US federal funding agencies focus more narrowly on research into
sleep disorders. Laura Spinney is a science writer
Spinney, Laura
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Spinney, Laura. "Dream weaver." New Scientist, 6 Mar. 2004, p. 53. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A114239080/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b1c5548f.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A114239080
Gavin Francis has had his flu jab. Shapeshifters, about bodies in flux, is due in May.
Science, technology and mathematics, Medicine, 1900-1999, 1900-1945, 1910-1919, Health, Laura Spinney, Europe, Asia, Americas
London Review Bookshop
Vol. 40 No. 2 · 25 January 2018
pages 3-6 | 3241 words
The Untreatable
Gavin Francis
BuyPale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney
Jonathan Cape, 352 pp, £20.00, June 2017, ISBN 978 1 910702 37 6
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I can’t remember the last time, before the current outbreak, when one of my patients died from flu. The strain involved in the last flu pandemic, the swine flu outbreak in 2009, was highly infectious, but milder than other pandemic strains have been. Of the 61.7 million people living in the UK in 2009, 457 died from it – comparable to the usual annual death toll for flu. The 1957 Asian flu and the 1968-69 Hong Kong flu pandemics were more serious; the death toll in each case was estimated at around a million worldwide.
I first found out about the current outbreak when I was called to a nursing home to see a patient in his nineties who had suffered two days of cough and fever. I knew Mr Wedderburn well; I used to visit him in his own home, before the slow creep of dementia made his life there untenable. He used to talk with me about his favourite books and music, but for the last couple of years he had been confused and distracted. Frail elderly people often have a less robust systemic response to infection than the young and fit, but even so, Mr Wedderburn was flushed with a temperature of 38°C, and was breathing much too quickly. As I listened to his lungs with my stethoscope his fingers picked at the bedcovers, and his feet knocked against his cot-bars. When I took a viral swab from his nose, he screwed up his eyes and muttered ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’
I phoned his niece: no, she didn’t think he’d want to be admitted to hospital if he were to deteriorate. ‘He’s an old man,’ she said to my relief, ‘I think he’d prefer to take his chances.’ That was Friday afternoon. Over the weekend I was on call for the GP night service, and visited three more nursing homes to assess cases of flu. A message came through from the health board: the swabs GPs were sending in were testing 74 per cent positive for influenza, but there was no evidence yet of a spike in deaths. When I returned to my own clinic after the weekend there were two papers on my desk: a lab report confirming Mr Wedderburn’s influenza, and a note reporting that he’d died.
‘It can’t just be flu,’ patients often say. ‘I feel absolutely dreadful.’ Sweats, fever, headache, muscle pain, breathlessness, cough: for many fit young people, a bad dose of the flu is their first intimation of mortality. Flu virus hijacks airway tissues, forcing the cells lining them to reproduce copies of themselves. That process irritates and inflames; sneezes and coughs spread new generations of the virus. Bacteria reproduce more easily in flu-debilitated, inflamed lungs, so if flu itself doesn’t give you pneumonia, other micro-organisms might – and this secondary infection can be more dangerous than the virus itself. You can do something about the dehydration and fever, but beyond that there’s little effective treatment once the illness is established.
Every autumn the fridge in my consulting room is stacked high with vaccines, and every October my colleagues and I jab hundreds of shoulders. Of the 3700 patients registered at my practice about a thousand are eligible for a flu vaccination, because of age, lung disease or some other infirmity. We don’t vaccinate just to protect the most vulnerable: the hope is that raising the background level of immunity among a selected population will slow the spread of seasonal flu among the rest. Usually just over a quarter don’t take up the invitation; this year we ordered 750 vials.
This year marks the centenary of Spanish flu, the most deadly pandemic in human history. It is estimated that five hundred million people contracted it – a third of the global population in 1918 – and that between fifty and a hundred million of them died. Asians were thirty times more likely to die than Europeans. The pandemic had some influence on the lives of everyone alive today. Donald Trump’s grandfather Friedrich died from it in New York City. He was 49. His early death meant that his fortune passed to his son Fred, who used it to start a New York property empire. My wife’s great-grandmother died from it in Verona; her grandfather, aged eight, had to leave school and find work to support the family. Emilio died in 2011 aged 101. When I told a friend, the writer Andrew Greig, that I was writing this piece, he told me that his father, born in 1899, came down with Spanish flu while on leave from the war in France. ‘His convalescence delayed his return to the front, where his battalion was all but wiped out,’ Andrew said. ‘He always insisted Spanish flu saved his life, and without it, I suppose I wouldn’t be alive either.’
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Laura Spinney’s book attempts to collate what is known about the pandemic, and takes a stab at examining its legacy: ‘The flu resculpted human populations more radically than anything since the Black Death,’ she writes. ‘It influenced the course of the First World War and, arguably, contributed to the second. It pushed India closer to independence, South Africa closer to apartheid, and Switzerland to the brink of civil war. It ushered in universal healthcare and alternative medicine, our love of fresh air and our passion for sport.’
The majority of deaths came in the three months between September and December 1918. The war probably didn’t spawn it, but certainly helped it spread: the US lost more soldiers to flu than to the war in part because so many of them spent weeks coughing together in barracks and transports on their way to Europe. Britain and Italy suffered between two and three times more deaths from the war than from the flu, while Germany’s war deaths outnumbered flu deaths six to one. Spinney quotes historians who claim that flu struck Germany harder than Britain or France; Erich Ludendorff was convinced it had robbed Germany of victory. The spread of Spanish flu was quickened by the railway and steamer lines that girdled the planet, starkly illuminating global inequalities in security, nutrition and access to medical care. In India 6 per cent of the population died; in Fiji 5 per cent; in Tonga 10 per cent. In Western Samoa, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, more than 20 per cent of the population died. Even harder hit were the Alaskan Inuit, with a death rate between 25 and 50 per cent: in some small Alaskan communities everybody died. Koreans and Japanese were infected at the same rate, but the Koreans, subject to chronic malnutrition, were twice as likely to die. In the US, Italian immigrants died at twice the background rate (the Italian neighbourhoods of New York had a density of five hundred per acre, ten to a room), while black populations were the least affected. ‘As far as the “Flu” is concerned the whites have the whole big show to themselves,’ J. Franklin Johnson wrote to the Baltimore Afro-American. It was just as well, he added, or ‘health talks to coloured people would have been printed by the wholesale in 72-point type in the daily papers.’ Most flu epidemics have a U-shaped distribution curve, disproportionately afflicting the very young and very old. Spanish flu had a W-shaped distribution curve, with an extra peak of deaths in young, fit 20-40 year olds. Theories vary, but it’s possible that this population wasn’t exposed to the widespread Russian flu of the 1890s; it’s also possible that, being in peak fitness, they may have had a damagingly brisk immune response. Pregnant women were particularly vulnerable.
The flu wasn’t Spanish at all. The name stuck when in May 1918 the Spanish king, the prime minister and his entire cabinet all came down with it. In Madrid, it was known as the Naples Soldier after a catchy tune then in circulation, while French military doctors called it Disease 11. In Senegal it was Brazilian flu; in Brazil it was German flu. Poles called it the Bolshevik Disease and the Persians thought the British were responsible (Spinney writes about its devastating effect on the city of Mashed, where it probably arrived with a Russian soldier from the north).
As to the original source of the pandemic, there are three chief candidates: Kansas poultry farms, the army barracks of Etaples in northern France, and the Shansi province in China. In China, where flu was known as the ‘little plague’, there are reports of a flu-like epidemic in late 1917. A physician named Wu Liande thought he’d isolated the plague bacillus Yersinia pestis from the lungs of the victims (in 1910 Liande had helped rein in a Yersinia epidemic responsible for sixty thousand deaths). But sophisticated laboratory techniques hadn’t yet been devised, and it’s possible he diagnosed an incidental secondary infection. In late 1917 and early 1918 a Chinese Labour Corps of 135,000 men was transported from Tsingtao by ship to the US, across America by rail, then onwards to dig trenches in France. It’s possible that they carried the flu with them. A similar corps of 200,000 men was transported west through Russia.
The first case of Spanish flu was recorded on 4 March 1918, when a military mess cook called Albert Gitchell in Camp Funston, Kansas, reported sick with a headache and fever. By the following day a hundred others had reported the same symptoms. A hangar was requisitioned to house the men, but flu has an incubation period of a couple of days, and had already moved on, aided by the war machine. By mid-April it had reached the Western Front, where three-quarters of French troops and half the British fell ill; 900,000 German soldiers were taken out of action. In April it also surfaced in South-East Asia, and in May, as the Spanish cabinet took to their beds, it was spreading through North Africa. On 1 June the New York Times reported it spreading through China (possibly for the second time), and later that summer it reached Australia. That was the first wave; through the summer of 1918 the pandemic seemed to be on the wane.
But in August a second and more deadly wave struck all at once in Sierra Leone, Boston and Brest. The virus seems to have mutated, making it more transmissible and provoking a more florid inflammatory reaction. Ten thousand died in Addis Ababa; Haile Selassie said that he fell ‘gravely ill’, but ‘was spared from death by God’s goodness’. In Prague Kafka became ill; in Dublin Yeats’s pregnant wife, Georgie, was stricken, as was Ezra Pound in London. In Zamora in north-west Spain the bishop ordered a novena – the community was to gather for nine consecutive evenings to pray to St Rocco, patron saint of pestilence, and to kiss his relics. Observant locals noted that afterwards ‘Zamoranos seemed to be dying in higher numbers than the residents of other provincial capitals.’
In New York City the public health commissioner, Royal S. Copeland, eliminated rush hour by staggering shop, school and factory opening times. He was under pressure to close schools, but after infancy children were relatively unaffected by the virus, and Copeland argued that schools could help disseminate health advice to their communities. He opened 150 health centres to deal with the sick, and insisted that all flu patients who lived in shared accommodation be hospitalised. Public health information was distributed by an obliging press: the Italian-language Progresso Italo-Americano sold close to a hundred thousand copies a day in New York alone, and raised funds for an Italian hospital in Brooklyn. Copeland allowed children to go to school, but he banned them from theatres. When Charlie Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms came to New York in October, Harold Edel, the manager of the Strand Theatre, wrote: ‘We think it a most wonderful appreciation of Shoulder Arms that people should veritably take their lives in their hands to see it.’ Edel was dead within a week, of flu.
Although there was no effective treatment for the virus, aspirin was taken by the tonne (its German manufacturer, Bayer, was suspected of spreading flu through its pills); aspirin poisoning possibly killed some who would otherwise have survived. Across the world communities adapted traditional remedies: in China, public sweat baths, opium and herbal extracts; in India, hill tribes moulded figures out of flour and water, and waved them over the sick. In New Jersey William Carlos Williams, working as a family physician, wrote: ‘We doctors were making up to sixty calls a day. Several of us were knocked out, one of the younger of us died, others caught the thing, and we hadn’t a thing that was effective in checking that potent poison that was sweeping the world.’ ‘We were all in the same boat,’ wrote Maurice Jacobs, a doctor in Hull, ‘tossed about on pestilent seas, sick at heart and frustrated.’ In Odessa, in September, some Orthodox Jewish merchants organised a black wedding, shvartze khasene, to appease the flu. Spinney describes it as ‘an ancient Jewish ritual for warding off lethal epidemics that involved marrying two people in a cemetery … the bride and groom must be chosen from among the most unfortunate in society.’ According to the Odessan novelist Mendele Mocher Sforim, the bride and groom were ‘the most frightful cripples, degraded paupers and lamentable ne’er-do-wells as were in the district’.
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The structure of the flu virus was first seen in 1943, when effective electron microscopes became available. They are just 0.1 microns across, between a tenth and a twentieth of the size of the bacilli most often associated with pneumonia. It’s moot whether they are even alive: viruses are simply packets of protein and fat, together with some nucleic acids to encode proteins. The flu virus carries just eight strands of RNA, with which it creates copies of itself. Two kinds of protein jut out from its surface: Haemagglutinin is the skeleton key that allows the flu virus to slip into living cells; Neuraminidase is the battering-ram that bursts its progeny out. These antigens can be recognised by our immune system and used to destroy the virus; we name flu strains according to which H and N subtypes they carry.
The seasonal flu vaccine I’ve been jabbing this year contains elements of three separate strains. There are two sorts of influenza A: H1N1 (a strain similar to the swine flu of 2009) and H3N2, the strain causing the current outbreak, recently arrived from the southern hemisphere (which is why the tabloids have been calling it ‘Aussie flu’). H3N2 mostly afflicts the elderly. The third strain is influenza type B, which affects children more severely than it does adults. Every year a team of vaccine advisers from the World Health Organisation analyses the prevalent strains around the globe and makes recommendations as to which should be included in vaccines.
Since viruses aren’t alive in the way that bacteria are, they can’t be grown on agar jelly. Virology was largely a mystery until 1931, when a Russian called A.A. Smorodintseff managed to breed viruses inside chickens’ eggs. In 1933 a ferret sneezed in the face of a researcher named Wilson Smith at the Medical Research Council unit in Mill Hill, London. Smith caught flu from the ferret. His subsequent paper in the Lancet showed that flu virus was the infectious agent, and that it could be transmitted between animals and people. In 1936 Smorodintseff invented flu vaccination: he took flu viruses and preferentially bred the ones that were poorest at reproducing. He injected these mild versions of the virus into two human subjects: they developed a low fever, but the jab seemed to confer protection against more virulent strains of flu. Some modern flu vaccines are weakened live versions of the virus, similar to the ones Smorodintseff grew, but the ones in my fridge are heat-treated to render them inert.
By exposing large sections of the public to a variety of H and N antigens, seasonal flu vaccination helps reduce the risk of another pandemic, but that risk can’t be eliminated. H and N variants are in ceaseless evolution, and flu viruses can hide for long periods in host animal populations, many of which don’t suffer any ill effects. This transmissibility between animals and humans is one key to its virulence; another is the ability of its antigens to mutate. Animal ‘reservoirs’ allow flu strains to recombine until a new pandemic strain breaks out again – which it will. Every flu pandemic of the 20th century followed the emergence of a new Haemagglutinin antigen: H1 in 1918, H2 in 1957 and H3 in 1968.
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Two thousand years ago horses were probably the main reservoir for flu, but the virus is now usually found in the digestive tracts of birds, or occasionally pigs (as in the case of swine flu). All three theories of the origins of Spanish flu point to birds as the source of the pandemic: the French virologist Claude Hannoun found a hundred different strains of flu in the birds of the Somme estuary; in China, flocks of ducks are traditionally herded through paddy fields to eat insects, and mingle there with wild birds; the evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey suggested that Spanish flu may have come from the poultry farms of the Midwest.
In 1951 a Swedish-Iowan pathologist, Johan Hultin, travelled to Alaska and sampled lung tissue from graves at Brevig Mission, one of the Inuit communities badly affected by Spanish flu. The graves were relatively well preserved in permafrost, but even so Hultin didn’t manage to get enough samples of the virus to reproduce it. In 1997 the virologists Ann Reid and Jeffery Taubenberger worked with a scrap of lung from a 1918 flu victim, preserved for seventy years in formaldehyde. They succeeded in extracting some damaged RNA, but again too little to reconstitute the virus. Hultin read of Reid and Taubenberger’s research and returned to Brevig Mission: he was again given permission to dig, and this time exhumed an obese woman whose lungs had been preserved in fat. Enough flu virus was recovered from the lungs to be sequenced, and the results, published in Nature in 2005, suggested that the 1918 virus was avian in origin, but that a mutation had rendered it fatally adept at infecting mammals. When the reconstituted virus was given to mice under barrier conditions the mice lost 13 per cent of their body weight and produced forty thousand times more infectious particles than mice with ordinary seasonal flu. Six days after infection, all the mice were dead. The virus is currently held in a high-security facility in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2016, around 1.7 million people died from tuberculosis, around a million from HIV/Aids, and around half a million from malaria. Computer modelling suggests that if the 1918 H1N1 virus were to break out of the facility in Atlanta it would cause around thirty million deaths.
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Letters
Vol. 40 No. 3 · 8 February 2018
Gavin Francis may well wonder why Western Samoa had a disproportionately high death rate in the 1918 flu pandemic (LRB, 25 January). In fact, it was caused by the incompetence of the New Zealand authorities’ administration of the former German Samoa (captured by New Zealand in August 1914). Ships’ passengers who had contracted flu elsewhere were allowed ashore at the capital, Apia. The result was that, of a total indigenous population of 38,000, more than seven thousand died.
Roger Paulin
Trinity College, Cambridge
One of the cadavers from which samples of Spanish flu virus have been taken was that of Sir Mark Sykes, who along with Georges-Picot reorganised the Middle East after the First World War. Sykes was exhumed in 2008, and his lungs and brain supplied 17 samples of the virus for research.
Karl Sabbagh
Bloxham, Oxfordshire
Book Review | The Shortlist
Three Books That Track Diseases, Drugs and the World They Made
By AMANDA SCHAFFERDEC. 29, 2017
Photo
Credit John Gall
PALE RIDER
The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World
By Laura Spinney
332 pp. PublicAffairs. $28.
Photo
Each time the specter of bird flu arises, so too do grim references to the global pandemic that killed tens of millions of people in 1918. And yet Spinney, a novelist and science writer, argues that almost a century later, the Spanish flu is “still emerging from the shadows of the First World War” in our collective memories. She sets out to rectify this, knowing just which medical mysteries and haunting vignettes will give the pandemic full purchase on our imaginations.
Researchers now believe that the 1918 virus originated in birds, but exactly when and where it made the leap to humans remains under debate. Spinney explores three possibilities: In March 1918, a mess cook at the United States Army’s Camp Funston in Kansas contracted the disease, possibly from a nearby farm. Yet more than a year earlier, a flulike illness had ravaged a military camp, close to the Western Front in northern France. And in 1917 an unknown respiratory disease also swept communities in Northern China, which sent workers to assist the allies as part of the Chinese Labor Corps.
Wherever human transmission occurred, as soon as it did the disease spread around the world, accelerated by troop movements, poor nutrition and overcrowding. At the time, no one knew where the flu had come from or why it was so deadly; misinformation abounded as, Spinney writes, “news of the flu was censored in the warring nations, to avoid damaging morale.” The French, British and American publics blamed the Spanish, generating its ubiquitous misnomer (the pandemic had already struck France and the United States before it arrived in Spain in May 1918), the Brazilians accused the Germans, “the Persians blamed the British, and the Japanese blamed their wrestlers.”
Spinney describes how various communities tried to make sense of the disease and manage its impact. Some areas instituted public health measures like banning funerals and parades. Others tried mixtures of ritual and desperation, which Spinney describes with a novelist’s eye: In Odessa, Russia, the community held a “black wedding” between beggars to defend against the disease. In Rio de Janeiro, individuals positioned corpses’ feet in their windows so that public agencies would know to remove the bodies.
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MIRACLE CURE
The Creation of Antibiotics and the Birth of Modern Medicine
By William Rosen
358 pp. Viking. $28.
Photo
In the 1930s, the advent of sulfa drugs represented a turning point for the health care industry, previously limited in its ability to fight infectious disease. Doctors now had a potential cure for strep, meningitis and gonorrhea, while patients were for the first time requesting a specific treatment by name. In “Miracle Cure,” Rosen skillfully blends scientific, political and economic history to trace the development of antibiotics and how they underwrote the modern pharmaceutical trade.
He dedicates much of his narrative to penicillin, which catalyzed the greatest change in both industry and clinical practice, starting with the Scottish physician Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery, in the 1920s, that a penicillin-producing fungus slowed the growth of staph bacteria in a petri dish. In 1940, British researchers led by the Australian pathologist Howard Florey established the drug’s efficacy in mice. Recognizing the mass-market potential, Florey enlisted the United States Department of Agriculture’s Northern Regional lab in Illinois, where a bacteriologist found “a mold so powerful that it would, by the end of the 1940s, be the ancestral source for virtually all of the world’s penicillin.”
For Rosen, part of what made penicillin’s path so revolutionary was the government’s reliance on private companies like Pfizer and Merck to produce large quantities of the compound as part of the war effort. The lucrative federal contracts these entities received muscled out competitors and established Big Pharma as we know it. “The only comparable events in American economic history were the deals that built the transcontinental railroad and allocated the radio broadcast spectrum.”
Other antibiotics followed, promising to cure diseases from typhus to tuberculosis. Enter the age of drug-resistant “superbugs,” the consequence of corporate marketing, prescription-happy physicians and the use of growth-inducing antibiotics in livestock. Rosen’s take on this crisis is understandably cursory, given that he died of cancer shortly after finishing the book. He does make clear, though, that the current pipeline is meager, and the future of antibiotics insecure.
CATCHING BREATH
The Making and Unmaking of Tuberculosis
By Kathryn Lougheed
272 pp. Bloomsbury Sigma. $27.
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In the 1940s, scientists developed the first cure for tuberculosis, the drug streptomycin. The disease almost immediately showed signs of resistance, so researchers devised a combination therapy to hold tuberculosis at bay temporarily. Yet, as Lougheed, a science journalist and former disease researcher, explains, tuberculosis continues to evolve in new and menacing ways — spurred on in part by our very efforts to contain it.
Lougheed’s history of tuberculosis dates it back to ancient mummies and medieval bones. She touches on New England folklore that links the disease to vampirism, as well as TB’s 19th-century associations with creativity (think: Frédéric Chopin, Keats and the Brontës). Still, she is generally flippant about the cultural significance of disease; she calls Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” “a looong German book set in a TB sanatorium.”
Fortunately she becomes more engaged as she delves into contemporary research on the pathogen itself. Tuberculosis establishes a complex presence in the people it infects: Upon entering the body usually through the lungs, it is engulfed by immune cells called macrophages. In most cases, instead of succumbing to them, the bacteria spur the creation of organized structures, called granulomas, fortified by walls that are several cells thick, making them hard for drugs to penetrate. This means that as patients undergo treatment, the bacteria may be exposed to “sub-lethal concentrations” of drugs, which can hasten the evolution of resistance. In addition, granulomas often enter a quiescent state, during which they may be even less susceptible to therapy.
Lougheed offers an impressive survey of current attempts to diagnose and treat the disease, from the experimental use of cancer drugs that modify the immune system to statins, which are typically prescribed to lower cholesterol. (As it happens, M. tuberculosis can feed on cholesterol within the body.) Without underplaying the challenges, especially of TB’s multidrug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant strains, she presents a league of smart scientists whose ingenuity and commitment offer at least some sense of hope.
Amanda Schaffer is a science writer who covers medicine and health for The New Yorker.
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A version of this review appears in print on December 31, 2017, on Page BR26 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Disease. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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'More deadly than bullets or bombs': In just three years the Spanish flu wiped out 100million people - more than BOTH World Wars - and made victims' teeth crack and toes turn blue
Spanish flu was ‘the greatest tidal wave of death since the Black Death’
It was a gruesome killer that made victims' teeth fall out and bodies turn blue
The three year epidemic and wiped out as many as 100 million people worldwide
Here Laura Spinney shows how it cast a long, dark shadow over the 20th century
By John Preston for the Daily Mail
Published: 17:42 EST, 1 June 2017 | Updated: 03:45 EST, 2 June 2017
BOOK OF THE WEEK
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 And How It Changed The World
by Laura Spinney (Jonathan Cape £20)
One morning in March 1918, Albert Gitchell, a mess cook at a U.S. Army base in Kansas, reported to the camp infirmary complaining of a sore throat, a headache and a fever.
The doctor checked him over, but couldn’t see any cause for alarm.
By lunchtime, the infirmary was full of soldiers, all of them displaying the same symptoms. Within a month, so many had reported sick that the camp’s medical officer requisitioned an aircraft hangar to accommodate everyone.
This was the start of the Spanish flu —‘the greatest tidal wave of death since the Black Death’, as Laura Spinney puts it in this vividly recreated, grimly fascinating book. Yet to begin with, hardly anyone in authority could bear to acknowledge what was happening.
Spanish flu was ‘the greatest tidal wave of death since the Black Death’ - killing as many as 100 million people
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Spanish flu was ‘the greatest tidal wave of death since the Black Death’ - killing as many as 100 million people
For people still struggling to come to terms with the devastation of World War I, it seemed scarcely credible that another huge black cloud had appeared on the horizon.
‘Queer epidemic sweeps northern China,’ the New York Times told its readers on June 1, but no one paid much attention. It wasn’t long, though, before Spanish flu became impossible to ignore.
First, people’s hands and toes turned dark blue. Then, a few days later, they turned black. People watched in horror as the disease crept relentlessly up their arms and legs. Their hair and teeth fell out and they gave off a strange smell — ‘like musty straw’.
By the time the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire died in November 1918, his skin had turned the colour of coal. The last few days of the illness were the most terrible of all. Delirious and too weak to move, people ended up drowning in their own bodily fluids.
By the time the disease had burned itself out almost three years later, as many as 100 million people had died — quite possibly exceeding the total number of people killed in both World Wars.
From Panama to Peking, they keeled over in their hundreds of thousands. In Rio de Janeiro, gravediggers couldn’t work fast enough to bury all the bodies — one man described going for a walk and seeing a human foot ‘suddenly blooming’ out of the earth.
In London, the great Russian dancer Leonide Massine, who was giving a performance of Cleopatra at the Coliseum Theatre, became terrified that his skimpy costume might make him vulnerable to the Spanish flu
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In London, the great Russian dancer Leonide Massine, who was giving a performance of Cleopatra at the Coliseum Theatre, became terrified that his skimpy costume might make him vulnerable to the Spanish flu
In London, the great Russian dancer Leonide Massine, who was giving a performance of Cleopatra at the Coliseum Theatre, became terrified that his skimpy costume might make him vulnerable to the Spanish flu.
‘I wore nothing but a loincloth,’ he recalled. After his character died, he had to lie still on the icy stage ‘while the cold penetrated to my bones’.
The next morning, much to his relief, Massine found he was fine. But when he went to the theatre, he learned that the policeman who always stood at the entrance — ‘a hulk of a man’ — had died during the night.
From Panama to Peking, they keeled over in their hundreds of thousands. In Rio de Janeiro, gravediggers couldn’t work fast enough to bury all the bodies — one man described going for a walk and seeing a human foot ‘suddenly blooming’ out of the earth
It seemed as if the whole world had been affected by this dreadful, mysterious pestilence. In Bangkok, a British doctor noted that all his prize roses had withered and died, while in Portugal, the inhabitants of a mountain village were greatly alarmed to see huge numbers of owls screeching and hooting around their homes.
Amid the chaos and grief, two questions were on everyone’s lips: was there a cure? And who was to blame?
Warehouses were converted to keep infected people quarantined (picture dated 1919)
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Warehouses were converted to keep infected people quarantined (picture dated 1919)
Predictably enough, all manner of quacks confidently put forward their pet theories. Some held that chain-smoking would keep the disease at bay, others that alcohol taken in copious quantities was the answer.
In fact, drinking yourself into a state of oblivion was probably as good a response as any. The Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier locked himself away in his Paris apartment for several weeks, smoking and boozing like a maniac — and later emerged unscathed.
For a time, taking aspirin was thought to offer some protection against the virus. People duly wolfed down as many pills as they could lay their hands on — so much so that a number of them actually died of aspirin poisoning.
Others gave themselves mercury injections after learning that syphilitics, who were treated with daily mercury jabs, appeared to have a higher survival rate.
Nurses care for victims of the Spanish Flu in 1918 in Massachusetts as the virus spread around the world
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Nurses care for victims of the Spanish Flu in 1918 in Massachusetts as the virus spread around the world
What everyone was at a loss to explain was why the disease struck in such a random fashion. In South Africa, workers in the Kimberley diamond mines were virtually wiped out, yet in the gold mines of the Rand there was barely a single incidence of Spanish flu.
The Spanish may have given their name to the flu, but this had as much to do with anti-Spanish sentiment as anything else — Spain having remained neutral during World War I
Even today, no one is sure what the explanation is. The most likely bet is that the Rand gold miners had been partially immunised against the virus after coming into contact with large numbers of people at a nearby railway station. Being more isolated — and without a station — their luckless colleagues in Kimberley caught the full force of the illness.
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As for what — or who — was responsible, that was an even harder question to answer.
The Spanish may have given their name to the flu, but this had as much to do with anti-Spanish sentiment as anything else — Spain having remained neutral during World War I.
In Senegal it was known as the Brazilian flu and in Brazil the German flu.
The Iranians blamed the British, while the Japanese laid the fault squarely at the feet of sumo wrestlers — flu first broke out in Japan at a sumo-wrestling competition.
Spinney demonstrates how Spanish flu cast a long, dark shadow over the 20th century. In its wake, the idea of quarantining people who were thought to pose a danger to society gained enormous popularity — thus paving the way, albeit indirectly, for the Nazi concentration camps
Coolly, crisply and with a consistently sharp eye for the telling anecdote, Spinney shows how flu has been around in one guise or another since the 16th century — the word ‘influenza’ was coined by the Italians who attributed the disease to the influence of the stars.
She also demonstrates how Spanish flu cast a long, dark shadow over the 20th century. In its wake, the idea of quarantining people who were thought to pose a danger to society gained enormous popularity — thus paving the way, albeit indirectly, for the Nazi concentration camps.
Even now the consequences are with us — though we might not be aware of it.
After the death from flu in 1918 of one man who had emigrated from Germany to America, his widow and son decided to invest his legacy in property. Over the next 50 years, the widow’s property investments did pretty well.
So too, in his own distinctive way, did her grandson. His name? Donald J. Trump.
dvdb4truth, Austin, United States, 8 months ago
But but the brits invented con camps. On the colonies.
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Hactov, Yorkshire, United Kingdom, 8 months ago
Out there, all over the world, flu viruses are mutating and remutating - pulling the handle on the genetic slot machine countless times till it hits a billion to one combination. Eventually a virus will emerge which is transmittable between human and deadly in effect (but which does not kill its host too quickly so it can be spread). There will be no cure (although people in desperation will swallow all sorts of proprietary snake oil) and the young, their stronger immune system provoking the cytokine storm which will drown them, will be most vulnerable. This is probably the apocalypse to which we are most vulnerable and there is not much we can do especially as International travel will make things worse. It's not if, it's when.
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Another Jones, Virginia, United States, 8 months ago
What an interesting article until you come to the last couple of sentences. Why do you HAVE to reference our President in almost every article?
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Hactov, Yorkshire, United Kingdom, 8 months ago
I think it's because a lot of the readers of the Mail online are in the USA. Also we don't have any UK politicians who are remotely interesting.
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Lady de Shalott., NW, United Kingdom, 8 months ago
My great Grandfather went through WW1, his cousin survived that hell also, only to be taken by the Spanish flu in 1919 leaving behind his young family, absolutely heart breaking .
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Logjam, Lillooet, Canada, 8 months ago
It was named Spanish 'flu because Spain was a neutral country that didn't suppress negative news during the Great War. It was spread by soldiers from Kansas USA being posted to the European war theatre. At first, Army doctors accused the sufferers of "malingering" thereby contributing to the rapid spread. The Spanish authorities publicised the epidemic there to try and stop the spread, without success, but unknowingly gave the name to the "Spanish 'flu."
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Hooky, Boston, United States, 8 months ago
while my father was in the trenches in France in three days his entire family were taken by the flu, he came home to an empty house
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Merricat, Philadelphia, 8 months ago
How tragic. They must have been worried to death he wouldn't return, he assumed no harm would come to them. Unimagineable.
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eddy26, Witsend, United Kingdom, 8 months ago
One day from the Amazon or Congo rain forests, or from the laboratory of some demented dictator something that makes the Spanish Flu look like the common cold will emerge, and then we will be in deep crap.
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jan, mordor, United Kingdom, 8 months ago
Sounds like something people in power today would let out to control the common people
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Fast_Castle, London, United Kingdom, 8 months ago
My great uncle was in the Royal Flying Corps and survived the First World War. only to die of Spanish flu after he was demobbed. He had risked his life every day over enemy lines.
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Bobby Smithe, Wales, United Kingdom, 8 months ago
Strangely it was the youngest and fittest that were hit hardest by the Spanish flu as it caused the immune system to overreact with a cytokine storm, paradoxically the sick and elderly suffered less because of their weakened immune systems. It's only a matter of time before something like this or worse hits again, I think our luck is due to run out soon.
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brickouthouse, North east, United Kingdom, 8 months ago
That is correct bobby, a few but not many books written about this subject.
Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories…
Review: Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World – Laura Spinney
August 16, 2017 in Books, Non-fiction • 0 Comments
The First World War looms large in our collective cultural memory, arguable even larger than the Second World War, though more people died in that conflict. This has been ascribed to a multitude of factors – the pointless, the waste, the static pace, the fact that the ‘War to End All Wars’ only served to give rise to another, the disappointed promises, the harsh peace. But regardless of the reasons, WW1, and its ‘Lost Generation’, stands as one of the colossal tragedies of the twentieth century, remembered every year, mourned, vowed to never be forgotten.
What is curious, however, is that there was another colossal tragedy, another episode of futility and helplessness and waste, that killed many more people, ten times as many, and did more to decimate the young and fit and contribute to the ‘Lost Generation’ than the War did. And yet this event has been forgotten, or at least ascribed to the footnotes of history. Every schoolchild learns about the Great War; many schoolchildren learn about the Black Death. But many people know nothing at all about the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918, that infected one in five people around the globe and killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million people, some 3-5% of the world’s population. One would think that such a cataclysm, an event that may well have been the biggest disaster in human history, would embed itself in the world’s memory just as deeply and painfully as a war, and yet…not.
In this engrossing and thoroughly interesting book Laura Spinney traces the course of the influenza epidemic across the globe, rather than focusing on any particular country. She explores the origins of its name, Spanish Flu; debates the three competing theories on where it originated; explains the epidemiology of the influenza virus itself and how it evolves and adapts; details that attempts by science and medicine to understand and treat the virus; and explores the accounts of those who experienced it firsthand, many painful and heartrending to read, of entire families, entire communities wiped out.
It is curious that an event that shaped the world as much as, perhaps arguably more, than the First World War, has been so neglected by history. I remember looking for a book on the Spanish Flu a few years ago, before this was published, and being surprised at how few titles were on the market. This is a welcome addition to a thin field, and serves as a fine overview to get anyone started. I’m on the hunt for more books on this topic now – so authors, get writing!
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Tags:epidemics epidemiology medicine world history world war one
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