Investigators today believe that in the United States the 1918-19 epidemic caused an excess death toll of about 675,000 people. The nation then had a population between 105 and 110 million, compared to 285 million in 2004. So a comparable figure today would be approximately 1,750,000 deaths. (153)

Following both The Long Walk and The Sisters Brothers, we chose for the third read in our 2019 Siblings’ Book Club another historical non-fiction, The Great Influenza by John M. Barry. While this book wasn’t devour-every-page interesting, it was fascinating enough for me to enjoy over the course of a few weeks in March, and I’m glad we put it on our list.

What sucked more than anything, though, was that literally the day after I finished reading the book, I got the flu. No joke. I thought I was going to die.

I didn’t die, of course, so now I’ve got the chance to review this book as a representative of the family. Sadly, there wasn’t near as much response to and conversation about Influenza as there was for the first two books in our Club this year, but I’ll try to make do with the what few murmurs I heard through the month.

Book Description

This book is filled to the margins with names and locations, points of medical history that help the author trace the progress of not only the influenza virus across the world, but also the capabilities of medical research at the turn of the century. With my minimal background in medical training (I was once certified in CPR and could even once dispense Advil like a wizard), I had literally no foundation for my understanding of what the medical world was like just a hundred or so years ago. As one member of our Book Club noted, however: “It was an interesting juxtaposition to read about the poorly-trained medical profession of the mid-1800’s in the early chapters of Influenza [alongside] Eli’s trip to the poorly trained dentist in Sisters Brothers.” I totally agree. I love how our book selections inadvertently flow together this way.

I felt like the book took its sweet time to rev up into something truly interesting. It wasn’t until Part 3, I believe, that we finally reached “the action” of the book—yes, that means all the death. It’s not necessarily a morbid interest that attracts someone to this book: it’s not like readers are rooting for the disease and hoping that even more people will die! But, while understanding that this is true history and long-since past, the reader finds himself, as the numbers fall, fascinated to see which cities will be the worst hit: Philly with its mismanagement, coal pollution, and sewage-filled streets? An Army Fort with its tens of thousands of new recruits and their essentially virgin immune systems? Or perhaps the front lines of the war in France with its soldiers entrenched in the battlefields and wallowing in their own filth? Hard to say, so we read on.

Some Favorite Lessons Learned

Perhaps my favorite chapter of all was Chapter 7, in which the author describes in intricate detail what exactly occurs at the cellular level when a person falls victim to influenza. He transitions from surmising the event’s starting location by writing: “Regardless of where it began, to understand what happened next one must first understand viruses and the concept of the mutant swarm.” (106)  He then goes on to describe the “M&M coating”, the spikes, the mimicry, and the mutations which are all both fascinating and terrifying. They were the things of my restless dreams while I suffered on my bed the week after I finished the book. If you read any part of this book, I’d recommend this particular chapter or the final chapters about Avery and the unexpected discovery of DNA. What I probably wouldn’t recommend is the plethora of back-matter which I personally skipped.

Things I learned from this book include the following bits of information:

• “There are three different types of influenza viruses: A, B, and C. Type C rarely causes disease in humans. Type B does cause disease, but not epidemics. Only influenza A viruses cause epidemics or pandemics, an epidemic being a local or national outbreak, a pandemic a worldwide one. Influenza viruses did not originate in humans. Their natural home is in birds, and many more variants of influenza viruses exist in birds than in humans. But the disease is considerably different in birds and humans. In birds, the virus infects the gastrointestinal tract. Bird droppings contain large amounts of virus, and infectious virus can contaminate cold lakes and other water supplies. This happens rarely, but it does happen. The virus may also go through an intermediary mammal, especially swine, and jump from swine to man. Whenever a new variant of the influenza virus does adapt to humans, it will threaten to spread rapidly across the world. It will threaten a pandemic.” (110)
  
• That the people most endangered by this strain of influenza were the healthiest 20-somethings, because “What was killing young adults a few days after the first symptom was not the virus. The killer was the massive immune response itself.” (259)
  
• The world of President Woodrow Wilson could have been the backdrop for such distopian stories as 1984: “By the summer of 1918, however, Wilson had injected the government into every facet of national life and had created great bureaucratic engines to focus all the nation’s attention and intent on the war.” (273) There was no freedom of speech, there were neighbors telling on neighbors and seemingly children telling on parents, if anyone dared to speak negatively of the war or the government.

Application

Overall, this book has given me a much better perspective on the various diseases (like Ebola and measles) that are spreading around the country and world right now. It also makes me recognize how utterly selfish the anti-vaccination weirdness is in this age (sorry if that steps on any toes), because it threatens not just one’s own children (which is bad enough), but one’s neighbors, town, nation, and world.

God gave us the right and responsibility to dominate nature, and we must do so by using nature against nature, when nature itself threatens to kill us all. I believe that we have the God-given right to do this through vaccinations, gene-editing, etc. “Playing God” with our scientific and technological advancements honestly seems to be in line with what the Creator designed us for. I’m sure there are some moral arguments against cloning, A.I., and the pursuit or reverse-aging, but why anyone would fight a moral battle against “the fight against disease” is beyond me. This train of thought doesn’t have much to do with the book (since there’s no final vaccination against next year’s influenza), but still, it gets me thinking.

Conclusion

Following this read, I am a bit more interested in watching some of the old pandemic movies like Outbreak, Contagion, or Children of Men. I’m sure there are many newer option in the genre, but whenever I try looking them up, I get zombie movies in response, which is annoying. While it would certainly be preferable for the world to suffer another influenza pandemic than the zombie apocalypse, the mere existences of peoples’ legitimate interest in and fear of zombies today downplays the true danger of mutant flu viruses and other real-life diseases. People need a good dose of reality, and this book helps brings the truth home.

©2019 E.T.