Previous
Chapter 13
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Great Influenza, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Leadership and Crisis
Truth, Free Press, and Propaganda
Science vs. Nature
Education, Research, and Institutions
Summary
Analysis
Though Haskell County, Kansas, seemed like the most likely source of the influenza epidemic that tore through Camp Funston, it was impossible to prove it. Though the disease spread widely, it wasn’t as deadly as it was in Haskell, and so some officials didn’t take it seriously yet.
Barry returns to the theme that many officials in 1918 had plenty of warning about the possibility of epidemics but refused to heed them. He suggests that waiting until a moment of crisis to act is too late, particularly when there is already so much evidence from the past to inform one’s actions.
Themes
Post-pandemic, some epidemiologists would go back through the records in search of unusual flu activity before the Funston outbreak, but they didn’t find any. In Europe, particularly in France, influenza didn’t begin to flare up in an unusual way until after the American troops’ arrival. It quickly spread out from there and soon presented a problem by rendering many soldiers unable to fight.
Because history is often pieced together in retrospect, it sometimes resembles detective work, with historians piecing together evidence that wasn’t always available to people living through the moment. Because no one was paying attention to influenza until it was too late, charting the movements of the disease was only accomplished through retrospective analysis.
Themes
Meanwhile, Spain remained neutral and only had a few cases before May 1918. The reason why the disease became known as the “Spanish flu” is likely because the press in Spain were the only ones publishing accounts of the disease (because, as a neutral country, Spain’s government wasn’t censoring papers to help the war effort). By the end of May, this influenza had reached as far as Shanghai and Sydney. Despite its wide spread, however, the disease remained relatively mild—so mild that some doubted if it was even influenza at all.
The importance of the free press is one of the biggest themes in The Great Influenza. But while Barry often portrays a free press as beneficial, he also shows some of the consequences—here Spain’s free press causes the country to gain an unjustified reputation as the source of the influenza virus. In the larger context of the book, however, Barry suggests that this downside to honesty is minor and that the problems suffered by nations with more repressive pandemic coverage, like the U.S., were actually much greater, since the lack of transparency led the public to mistrust institutions.
Themes
In a couple isolated locations, like Louisville, Kentucky and a small station in France, there were unusually high mortality rates. Welch, Cole, and Gorgas closely studied the epidemic’s progress abroad, looking for clues about what would happen next.
Despite humanity’s progress in understanding viruses, there were many aspects of them that remained mysterious in 1918 and which remain so today. This again shows the limits of science against nature.
Themes
Get the entire The Great Influenza LitChart as a printable PDF.
After a summer when about 1 in 10 British soldiers in France were too sick to fight, suddenly the disease seemed to be gone in mid-August. In the United States, there was never any widespread epidemic to begin with, though influenza remained active. In reality, the virus had not disappeared anywhere—it was just gone underground, temporarily.
Even with the warning from the early wave of influenza, many public health officials continued to underestimate the threat. Barry attempts to get rid of the myth that the 1918 pandemic (and pandemics in general) are impossible to predict; he suggests that, based on what they’d already learned, health officials should have been able to project that the virus would return with a vengeance.
Themes
