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Chapter 33
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
By World War I, the revolution in American medicine was complete, and it could finally compete with the rest of the world. The leading figures were a small group, with most of them connected to Hopkins, the Rockefeller Institute, or a handful of other major universities. They were also united by their almost single-minded approach to lab research, particularly during the height of the pandemic.
Up until late 1918, most of the innovators in American medicine were working in separate labs, with little communication among one another. As the second wave began to wane, however, some leading scientists organized a commission to focus on influenza. Even with all of them, they knew little about the disease, other than the fact that isolation helped stop its spread. But nevertheless, they were able to agree on a couple things.
The summary and recap of the course of the 1918 pandemic continues. Barry steps away from the granular stories about individuals and uses this high-level overview to examine broad patterns.
Themes
The scientists agreed that they had to perform epidemiological investigations, looking at how public health measures correlated with deaths and what measures for stopping the disease proved to be most effective.
While epidemiology and public health were disciplines before World War I, both the war and the pandemic caused major revolutions. The end of the pandemic didn’t bring a return to the scientific status quo but a continued quest to understand what happened and how to prevent it in the future.
Themes
Gorgas went into World War I with the goal of making it the first war where more soldiers died in battle than from disease. Had it not been for influenza, he might have succeeded, since American soldiers fared far better against diseases like malaria than some European soldiers.
Though in some ways the 1918 influenza pandemic is a story of the failure of government public health officials, Gorgas represents someone in the system who was trying to do good. Barry shows that, while Gorgas was limited in what he could do, he still managed to make some significant progress as a leader.
Themes
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The influenza commission of scientists had more meetings, and its members joined other commissions too. Everywhere, scientists collaborated on one of the most massive scientific inquiries ever undertaken. Their findings began to coalesce into a coherent body of knowledge.
This passage returns to the theme of how science is both a bunch of individuals working in separate labs as well as a global community. The end of the war and the pandemic allowed scientists to collaborate more widely and do more meticulous research.
Themes
First, the scientists confirmed that the deadly influenza pandemic in fall 1918 was a second wave of the less deadly spring influenza that year. Statistics helped confirm what many physicians already knew anecdotally: that the disease was particularly brutal on young adults. One theory was that a previous, much milder pandemic spread through the world at some earlier point, and that this left the elderly with surprising resistance to the 1918 virus.
One of the hallmarks of good science is that it relies on more than just anecdotal observation. While many reported from personal experience that young people were heavily affected by influenza, scientists after the pandemic knew it was important to verify claims like these by turning to more objective measures like statistics (which have their own limitations).
Themes
Surveys and investigations helped provide evidence for other things that were widely suspected but unproven: for example, that people who lived in the most crowded areas saw the worst spread. Still, one major gap in knowledge remained: the pathogen was still unknown, despite the efforts of the best scientists from around the world.
Even after the time pressure of the pandemic was removed, scientists struggled to discover the pathogen behind the influenza pandemic. This highlights how sometimes nature remains mysterious, even when confronted by the best of human science.
Themes
