Book #57: The Great Influenza: The Story of the Greatest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry

I was babysitting at a friend's house the other night and happened to see this book on their bookshelf. It sounded interesting enough to me that I checked it out from the library and read it this week. The book was really very interesting because of the magnitude of the 1918-1919 pandemic and also because of how little I'd ever heard about it. It's also interesting because it was published in 2004, before the swine flu and bird flu epidemics that everyone was so worried about in the last decade. (Interestingly, Barry says that the deadly flu strain in 1918 was H1N1, which should be instantly recognizable to everyone from the swine flu epidemic.)

It seemed to me that this book was a very ambitious project. Barry didn't just want to talk about where and how this flu pandemic started and spread, but he tried to discuss the actual medical and physiological processes that are going on in the body with viral and bacterial infections and diseases. He also talked a lot about the developments in the general scientific community in the few decades before and after the epidemic (which is obviously a huge topic and probably could be an entire book or books by itself). I was very fascinated in his history of how science and the field of medicine changed in the United States over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; according to Barry, at least, prior to Johns Hopkins University being set up, medical schools and the field of medicine in the U.S. were absolutely terrible and had no standards or expectations at all. Most medical schools didn't expect their students to have any prerequisite education (any, at all) and had no opportunities for their students to practice on patients, but around the turn of the century there was a lot of momentum for change in the system and Barry discusses how that happened. That was a really interesting part of the story for me. I wasn't so interested in all of the really technical and scientific chapters about how the immune system works and how the flu attacks different parts of the body, etc. I remember enough from my high school and college science classes to understand it, but it was pretty dry. I was also fascinated by the spread of the disease and how it literally covered the entire world.

One other thing I wasn't too energized about with this book was a few small things about Barry's writing style. He really liked to be a little dramatic with his writing, and emphasize certain sentences by setting them off in their own paragraph, like this (I'm making this up as an example, it's not from his book):

"The scientists worked really hard. They thought they were close to finding the cure to the disease and solving this epidemic.

They were wrong."

That "They were wrong"-type sentence happened over and over and over again. It's a good thing to do sparingly, but I noticed it enough that it started to bother me. Again, just a silly little thing, but I feel like if you start to notice elements of the writing style it distracts from the actual reading of the book.