Full review: "The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919"

My maternal grandmother contracted the Spanish flu during the pandemic of 1918/1919 - when she would have been about twenty years old - and survived, unlike perhaps as many as 50-100 million others. The only thing she ever mentioned to me about it was that her hair fell out and it grew back in completely white, but there must have been a lot more to the story.

The Spanish flu (a misnomer - it was a worldwide pandemic and did not originate in Spain) killed by causing hemorrhaging and severe lung fluid accumulation (one story told of coughing up "quarts" of sputum), followed often by pneumonia, and oddly the number of fatalities among young, healthy people was extremely high. We know now that this was a result of a "cytokine storm" - a particularly severe immune system reaction. Younger people with more robust immune systems had more severe cytokine storms and were thus more likely to die.

So it was with great interest that I picked up this book, a collection of academic papers on the subject edited by Maria'-Isabel Porras-Gallo and Ryan A Davis, from the University of Rochester Press in their Rochester Studies in Medical History collection. It divides into three parts: the science of the flu pathogen, epidemiological responses to the pandemic, and the resulting cultural upheaval from these (sometimes counterproductive) activities. World War I spread it more widely than would have otherwise occurred, and along the way there were many wrong turns. At first no one knew whether it was a bacteria or virus that caused the illness, and for a time excessive aspirin dosages were even blamed for some of the symptoms. News suppression during the pandemic grew into sensationalism later as movies and books speculated not only on 1918/1919 but also whether it might happen again. A good part of the book concentrates on under-reported findings from Europe (including, paradoxically, Spain) and Latin/South America.

Some of this - particularly the scientific findings in the first part - will be difficult for the lay reader to parse, but give it a try anyway. There's a lot here, you can read around the jargon, and it's still really, really relevant.

Highly recommended.

I received a pre-publication copy of this book in exchange for a review. The image above links to the book's Amazon page.