The Great Influenza Themes

John Barry’s The Great Influenza is about leadership’s ability to change the course of a crisis, both for better and for worse. In 1918, the world faced two related crises: an influenza epidemic that killed staggering numbers of people in a relatively short period of time, and World War I, which was the deadliest conflict that modern Europe had ever seen. Barry argues that much of this destruction, both in the war and in the…

The question of how the truth gets told is at the center of John Barry’s The Great Influenza. On the one hand, it is a book about extreme distortions of the truth. World War I led to the publication of tremendous amounts of propaganda in the press and the censorship of anything that might threaten the war effort—even in countries with a supposedly free press like the United States. The so-called “Spanish influenza” of…

Many of the heroes of John Barry’s The Great Influenza are not working alone but as part of laboratories, research institutions, and universities. The early part of the book deals with the founding of Johns Hopkins University and the Rockefeller Institute, two institutions that played a key role in the development of modern American medicine. As Barry shows, one of the reasons why American medicine and medical research lagged so far behind European countries (particularly…