America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 2nd Edition by Alfred W. Crosby (PDF)

Description

Between August 1918 and March 1919 the Spanish influenza spread worldwide, claiming over 25 million lives – more people than perished in the fighting of the First World War. It proved fatal to at least a half-million Americans. Yet, the Spanish flu pandemic is largely forgotten today. In this vivid narrative, Alfred W. Crosby recounts the course of the pandemic during the panic-stricken months of 1918 and 1919, measures its impact on American society, and probes the curious loss of national memory of this cataclysmic event. This 2003 edition includes a preface discussing the then recent outbreaks of diseases, including the Asian flu and the SARS epidemic.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I originally purchased this book for a college research paper regarding our nation’s response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, but I did not expect to fall in love with it as I did. I learned a great amount of what I needed to know for the class, specifically the similarities in differences in the respective responses to each pandemic, and more information that can honestly relate to a changing society, which you will find in abundance within this novel.

⭐I read this book just out of sheer curiosity to see how people responded to the virus back then and comparing it to what we are experiencing today. To my absolute surprise, nothing had changed over the past 101 years. There were mask mandates that people scoffed at, lockdowns that only staved off the inevitable, an so-forth and so-on. The one thing that has changed is the speed in which information can fly. At this point, everybody has a “cellphone-sized megaphone/bullhorn” that they can yell out to the world and reach millions to yell whatever they “feel” is right even if it isn’t. Just like the pandemic of today, when you look at the number of lives lost vs. infected and recovered, the percentage of death is pretty low. But therein lies part of the problem. We tend to marginalize that small percentage because we don’t see the worst outcome in person. That is literally telling people that have lost loved ones to this scourge that it really doesn’t matter. We are not thinking about our fellow man and what they have just seen. Think about how that would really feel if someone came up to you at a funeral for someone closest to you and said “meh, they were going to die anyway” I truly believe that you wouldn’t let that fly. We’ll eventually get though the current pandemic, but we as a species need to try to do better as far as preparation so that so many lives aren’t unnecessarily lost due to the simplest of solutions. Not only preparation but empathy also. I know things have been really trying during my life so far, but we can not afford to totally abandon civility to this thing. People are hurting and I get that fatigue has set up for a lot of us in my generation, but all we can do is strive to be better versions of ourselves and not throw in the towel. I know this was supposed to be a review for this book and it kinda turned soapbox-ish, but the book wasn’t bad. There was a part in here that I think the author went on about the war for a little more nuance and details that I wasn’t really looking for, but nonetheless, definitely a worthwhile read.

⭐If you want to get a step-back overview of the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and its attendant social updump, present and possible future, you’d be well advised to read accounts of the 1918 “Spanish” (misnamed; the disease did not originate in Spain) influenza pandemic, which killed some 675,000 Americans and perhaps 21 million people worldwide—and this is a good one. Laura Spinney’s Pale Rider is also good, providing a global perspective, but Crosby’s book focuses on the course of the pandemic in the United States, which is probably what most Americans are chiefly interested in.The 1918 flu pandemic is the only serious pandemic in anything like “modern” times, and despite their being roughly a hundred years apart and caused by different viruses (the COVID-19 is not part of the flu virus family), the two pandemics and their effects are eerily similar in several ways: the illnesses are both respiratory, both spread in similar ways, and both kill primarily by the same mechanism, almost surely an overreaction of the body’s immune system rather than a direct effect of the virus (though this was not known in 1918). Then, as now, there was no dependable treatment or vaccine, and people tried to slow the disease’s spread by wearing masks and closing down businesses. The differences between the two and their social surroundings are striking and instructive, too: we have the advantage of not being in the middle of a war (the 1918 pandemic overlapped the final battles and peacemaking process ending World War I), but, because the 1918 epidemic came and went so quickly (the whole thing lasted about a year, and the worst of it lasted less than a month), it had far less economic impact than the COVID-19 epidemic seems likely to have.Crosby’s book shows how the disease started and spread among the military, as soldiers were crowded together and moved around the world as part of the war effort, and also how it affected American civilians and how they reacted to it. He concentrates on the effects in large cities, particularly Philadelphia and San Francisco. In addition, he discusses how the epidemic affected the peacemaking process at the end of the war, the search for the cause of the disease (long assumed to be a bacterium called Pfeiffer’s bacillus, because almost nothing was known about viruses at the time), and why the pandemic had so little impact on collective memory, even for most of the people who lived through it. The book is not overly technical, and its subject matter is bound to be gripping for anyone living in the present medical and social climate. I recommend both Crosby’s and Spinney’s books highly.

⭐This is a good read about the 1918 pandemic, with both an overall narrative, detailed examples of individual people and specific communities, and also tables of various cities showing fatalities from influenza and pneumonia. It has a whole chapter devoted to the mask debates of 1918, focusing on San Francisco. The people of that city were far more skeptical than the population of today, and after the first mandate ended, and then another surge occurred, the Board of Supervisors voted against a second mask mandate! (Someone should write a sequel analyzing how the people of San Francisco become so servile in the 100 years since).While this book may have been written before the genetic sequencing of the 1918 flu, it doesn’t get anything of significance wrong. But there is about 25+ pages of speculation at the end that could have parts deleted and other loose ends tied up were in written today.One remarkable point the book makes about the people of 100 years ago — both ordinarily people and medical professionals were more willing to risk their lives in an era with no “PPE” as we call it today, and the Spanish Flu was several times more lethal that COVID-19. (Also, in the medical world, while bacteria were understood in 1918, viruses were more like a vague idea of a microorganism known only by the fact they could pass through filters that caught bacteria.

⭐Excellent book on the subject and very helpful when I was preparing a lecture on the subject!

⭐Great detailed descriptions of what happened but at times got a bit monotonous.

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