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Chapter 14
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
While the spring wave of the influenza pandemic wasn’t especially lethal, the second wave was. Several explanations have been proposed: the first is that the deadly disease was caused by a different virus than the mild disease. But this is unlikely, since victims of the first wave had significant resistance during the second.
The second possible explanation is that while in Europe, the American-originating virus encountered a European variant, and a new variant arose when the two viruses attacked the same cell and “reassorted” their genes in the process to create a deadlier version. Most experts today, however, also believe that this possibility is unlikely.
Barry mentions unlikely but possible explanations as a way of acknowledging that even contemporary science is fallible, and that while the best available evidence favors one possibility, it is worth considering others, even if only to learn why they fall short.
Themes
The third, and most likely, explanation is that the virus adapted to humans. In 1872, a French scientist studying anthrax in rabbits discovered that as the virus passed through different rabbit victims, it became more efficient at killing newly infected rabbits. The flip side of this, however, is that if a virus becomes too efficient, it runs out of hosts and destroys itself, so most of the time virulence will stabilize and eventually recede. It seems like this pattern of increasing virulence is similar to what happened during the 1918 influenza outbreak.
While Barry sometimes frames the conflict between humanity and nature as a battle, he also acknowledges the ways in which it’s a mutually dependent relationship. Though it may seem like viruses “want” to kill people quickly, in fact, such an outcome would be bad for the virus itself, since it would leave the virus without new hosts to spread to.
Themes
On June 30, 1918, a British freighter ship docked at Philadelphia and was carrying a deadly disease. Examining the British crew at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, the physicians and med students concluded that the crewmembers were dying of pneumonia but had strange influenza-like symptoms. The rumor was that these crewmembers died of Spanish influenza. The disease, however, didn’t spread.
Big transportation vessels like freighter ships are yet another symbol of modernity that show how the world was truly connected for perhaps the first time during World War I. Unfortunately, these connections provided ideal conditions for epidemics to flourish. While modern medicine helped protect people against many diseases, other aspects of modern life actually made diseases more consequential.
Themes
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Most history of the 1918 pandemic portrays it as abrupt and unexpected. In fact, however, the deadly second wave happened more gradually. Deadly outbreaks in the earlier part of the year remained limited in scope, like at one French base where five percent of all recruits died. By the end of August, the lethal variant of the virus had established itself in three continents—Europe, Africa, and North America—and it was poised to break out.
While Barry can only cover a limited scope of what happened during the 1918 pandemic in one book, he acknowledges the wider breadth of the pandemic. The fact that deadly outbreaks only occurred in some very specific areas again suggests that a virus—and by extension, nature—can act in unpredictable ways.
Themes
First, there were signs of an outbreak at Brest, a French city where many American soldiers landed. Soon after, influenza spread through Freetown, Sierra Leone, which was a major center for coal, killing at least three percent of the Africans living there—or perhaps even twice that. Finally, an overcrowded ship arrived in Boston. Two sailors were sick with influenza, but the number quickly multiplied, and so did the death toll.
These three incidents, spread across three continents, emphasize the extent to which the influenza pandemic was truly global. Notably, the movements that caused the disease to spread tended to be related to the war, suggesting that events like wars can have negative consequences that stretch beyond just battlefield casualties.
Themes
