Summary of The Great Influenza By John M. Barry

By Condensed Books

A chapter-by-chapter high-quality summary of John M. Barry ́s book The Great Influenza, including chapter details and an analysis of the main themes of the original book.
About the original book:
The world's most destructive influenza virus emerged in an army camp in Kansas during World War I, went east with American troops, and then burst, killing up to 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in a year than the Black Death did in a century, killing more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years. However, this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 was the first time science and pandemic sickness collided.
"The Great Influenza" offers us a precise and frightening model as we confront the epidemics lurking on our own horizon, and it is magisterial in its breadth of view and depth of scholarship. As Barry puts it, "The last lesson of 1918, which is both easy and difficult to put into practice, is that people in positions of power must maintain the public's faith. That can be accomplished by distorting nothing, putting the best face on nothing, and attempting to influence no one. That was the first and finest thing Lincoln said. Whatever evil exists, a leader must make it concrete. Only then would it be possible to dismantle it."

• Language: English
• Publisher: C.B. Publishers
• Release date: Jul 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9780463755457

Book preview

PROLOGUE

In September 1918, Paul Lewis, a navy lieutenant commander and a scientist examined bodies in a Philadelphia naval shipyard. He disliked having to guess a diagnosis, but he assumed the men were infected with influenza, although a more deadly kind than he had seen before.

He was accurate, and the pandemic in issue was the most deadly in terms of total deaths in world history.

The Great Influenza is a narrative of creativity and the beginning of science as a whole. As a result, the book begins with the evolution of medicine as a science and concludes with the future of science.

PART 1, CHAPTER 1

The founding of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in September 1876 was the most significant medical event in American history. The school's purpose, as stated in the dedication address, is to create a scientific institution that can compete with Germany and the rest of Europe.

Though science is akin to religion in that it is mostly about asking two questions: What can I know? and How can I know it? the speech did not address God. (14).

Up until that moment, medicine had a history of inaccuracy and a lack of fine-tuned processes. Hippocrates developed the notion of the four humors, which Galen would later formalize, yet both theories were incorrect. Their beliefs were based on natural observations rather than excursions (14).

The Renaissance witnessed several discoveries and scientists, but Edward Jenner's development of the smallpox vaccine in the late 1700s was the most important discovery before the 1800s. More importantly, Jenner devised a rigorous approach that would be replicated by future scientists (20).

Scientists tended to focus on observable facts and reason before Jenner's methods. However, obtaining medical knowledge only by reason poses several challenges. First, Galen's and others' therapies appeared to work, since bleeding a patient (a typical therapy for many disorders) did reduce some symptoms. As a result, there was no need to seek other treatment. Second, biology is not conducive to logic and reason. Physics is based on mathematics, but biology is based on chaos (24).

Cells might exist in pairs or have been rendered worthless through evolution. A good scientist would not be able to make sense of them just based on logic. The scientific method, on the other hand, would go a long way toward resolving this biological inconsistency and lack of rationality.

The notion of tissues was developed in the 1800s by scientists in Paris, who observed that illnesses invaded the body rather than being the result of imbalances. The disease was cataloged and temperature, blood pressure, and other parameters were measured using numerical techniques.

This was a significant step forward in terms of medical care and research. While the 1800s witnessed medical progress, it also saw stagnation, as physicians learned new theoretical concepts but not how to properly treat patients, with little theoretical information obtained about cholera and typhoid, for example, translating into curing or avoiding disease (28).

The medical profession as a whole grew less structured, particularly in the United States, where Thomsonism became popular. Thomsonism was predicated on the assumption that medicine was so straightforward that anybody could practice it (29).

Aside from the issue of unskilled physicians, no American institutions were sponsoring medical research, including those Americans who traveled to Germany to study from the great professionals, resulting in a gap in medical knowledge and development.

Johns Hopkins University wanted to change that. It worked, and by the time World War I broke out, America's medical expertise had surpassed that of Europe.

PART 1, CHAPTER 2

The majority of this chapter is devoted to William Henry Welch's biography. Welch was probably the single most important scientist in the world (37) despite being no major pioneer even in his field of medical study (36). He was a showman whose genuine contribution was motivating others to become great scientists and researchers.

He was born in 1850 in Norfolk, Connecticut, and lived through several revolutions over his lifetime. He learned to accept evolution, although it contradicted his early religious beliefs. He enrolled to teach Yale with the intention of teaching Greek.

Instead, he chose to work as an apprentice for his father, a physician, before enrolling at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. He was noticed by Francis Delafield, a professor who pushed him to study in Europe. Welch traveled to Germany to meet with other researchers.

Germany was the epicenter of research and medicine at the time. Many Americans attended, but only a small percentage were interested in learning about laboratory research. Welch returned from the trip convinced that German medical schools were far superior to those in the United States because they required extensive preparation from students, had independent funding and were backed by research from the German government and other universities (44).

The chapter concludes with the establishment of John Hopkins University's medical school. Dr. John Shaw Billings (the inventor of the world's first medical library) was dispatched to Europe by Daniel Gilman, Hopkins' first president, in 1877 to collect the greatest possible medical faculty. Billings met with Welch at a Leipzig beer pub and was impressed by him. Hopkins should hire Welch, he said.

That, however, would be placed on wait. As a result of the Panic of 1877, the B&O Railroad shares plummeted, making it hard for Hopkins to get funds. Welch intended to teach a laboratory course, but there was no such facility at any medical school in the United States. He eventually wound himself at Bellevue Hospital in New York, where he worked as a pathology lecturer for a pittance but was able to teach a laboratory class (although one without equipment) (47). Welch would later train the squad that battled the 1918 influenza