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Chapter 35
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
After the pandemic, Paul Lewis led an institute at the University of Pennsylvania. He kept working, researching tuberculosis and expanding his research into mathematics and biophysics. But he was unsatisfied with the results. Eventually, he accepted a new position at the University of Iowa that he hoped would help cure his restlessness. In fact, however, he ended up quitting the position before moving to Iowa in order to get set up in a lab closer to home in Philadelphia.
Paul Lewis, who found purpose and inspiration during the pandemic more than any other investigator, would struggle to find new goals in the years that followed. His acceptance and then abrupt refusal of the Iowa position show how Lewis was restless in these years and still searching for his next big idea.
Themes
Flexner helped Lewis get involved with a lab at Princeton. Lewis spent a peaceful year there but produced little. One year became three years with no results, and Flexner gently suggested that Lewis switch from tuberculosis work to something else. After five years with no results, Flexner began moving to end his research relationship with Lewis.
Lewis’s lack of new publications was not initially a problem—Avery followed a similar process and achieved great results. But Flexner sensed that something was different with Lewis and that he’d become aimless. Even a prominent scientist has to focus on new research instead of coasting on past discoveries.
Themes
In May 1928, a prominent scientist died while trying to investigate yellow fever. Other scientists wanted to continue his promising work, but Flexner refused to let young men go because of the danger. Lewis volunteered to go study a virulent strain of yellow fever in Brazil.
Barry leaves the question open of whether Lewis was bravely going to Brazil to attempt new research that only someone like him could do, or whether he had simply stopped valuing his own life enough to care about the danger from yellow fever.
Themes
Lewis set up a lab in Brazil and seemed to recover some of his old vitality. Soon, though, he fell ill, and just a few days later, he died. Per his widow’s request, there was no memorial. Flexner wrote an obituary for Lewis (who seemed to have accidentally caught yellow fever) and mentioned Lewis’s earlier accomplishments while omitting the last five years of his life.
The tragic end of Lewis’s story was perhaps somewhat predictable, given what happened to the previous scientists in his position. The fact that Flexner wrote Lewis’s obituary suggests how much of Lewis’s life was tied to his work—and why the lack of progress in his final years must have been so difficult for him.
Themes
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Richard Shope, a younger scientist working with Flexner, began researching swine influenza. He was able to determine definitively that influenza in swine is caused by a virus. Today, scientists know that the virus Shope discovered was directly descended from the 1918 human influenza virus.
Shope only gets a small role late in the book, and yet he made arguably the single most important discovery about the 1918 pandemic. Barry doesn’t do this to minimize Shope’s contributions, but simply to illustrate how much of Shope’s discovery was based on the long hours of work by the teams of scientists who preceded him.
Themes
Shope also proved that B. influenzae was a secondary invader during the pandemic and could still be highly lethal in its own right. Shope’s work sparked an immediate reaction around the world. Though Shope made some errors that the painstaking Lewis might have prevented, had he lived, Shope was ultimately recognized as a capable scientist.
Shope’s strengths and weaknesses as an investigator highlight the differences between eager new scientists and established veterans. Shope’s youth helped motivate him to chase exciting new ideas, but it also caused him to make mistakes that a veteran might have avoided.
Themes
Park, Avery, and Lewis all had different work methods, but these different styles allowed each of them to contribute to medical knowledge in their own ways. In some ways, Lewis was the last victim of the 1918 pandemic.
The final lines of the book emphasize the communal nature of science and the long-lasting impact of the 1918 influenza pandemic.
Themes
