The Pandemic Your Grandparents Forgot

The symptoms came on without warning. “We had dipped out of the dissecting room at St Thomas’s for a mid-morning break and strolled along the Embankment to Lambeth Bridge,” wrote microbiologist T. H. Pennington of a particular day in medical school. “Going there I felt fine. Coming back was terrible because of fever and aching limbs.” 

Ed Susman, a newspaper delivery boy in upstate New York, was hit even more suddenly: “I distinctly recall feeling very warm in one of the tenement houses where I had a number of customers. I walked out on the back porch, and I literally felt as if I had been hit by a moving wall. My knees buckled and I fell back against the wall of the building. I truly do not remember how I finished the route.”

A mysterious new respiratory virus was on the move out of China, cutting through a global population with virtually no immunity. But the year wasn’t 2020—it was 1957, 63 years earlier. Before the global H2N2 influenza