The Impact of the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918: How a Global Health Crisis Changed the World

ky: No politician should be without this book. Laura Spinney’s story is gripping and instructive from beginning to end. Alas it is too late now. It is nevertheless a real eye opener. We seem to have learned little since 1918. Only the science of viruses and vaccinations has advanced. Our societal and governance response seems as inept, ignorant, and clumsy as one hundred years ago. No closing of borders – except for an enlightened few- , dithering about masks and much else. Spinney’s book reveals many of the lies politicians told during this pandemic. For example, scientists monitor strains of virus in circulation using molecular clocks to try to predict increased transmissibility. To say the Kent or south African mutation came as an unexpected surprise event is one of many lies told by politicians during this pandemic.
Neglect, negligence and narcissism during this COVID pandemic has spiked Trump’s chance of four more years. It will do the same for Boris Johnson in Britain. While electors treat elections as game shows and elect empty suits with no proven competence or experience we will get nothing better. Trump is not a cause of what is wrong, he is a symptom. The...

United Kingdom on Jan 06, 2021

Richard Latham: A global phenomenon is the world-world pandemic that has loosely become known as Spanish Flu 1918.
That is was written prior to the COVID-19 crisis which the WHO termed a modern day pandemic and which we are still living through. Makes this a more interesting and telling account.
This is a well researched and detailed study; well indexed and with noted references throughout.
I found the book well paced and covered an enormous range of issues and covered many countries and how they saw it and how it was to many a slight infection of flu. Others especially of a certain age group, being pregnant or of poorer living standards, diet, housing and access to medicine fared much worse and modern estimates calculate a total mortality across the nations of between 50 - 100 million.
It tackles some of the issues I had.
My general ignorance of the subject compared to my knowledge of the Great War 1914-1918. It’s potential origins are discussed and why some were more susceptible than others and how social distancing was introduced in places. Why others responded differently. I liked the explanation of the growing medical knowledge and why this didn’t always bring relief or a...

United Kingdom on Jul 08, 2020

Mark Pack: A virus spreading around the world, aided by international travel. Difficulties getting people to follow social distancing. Debates and disagreement over the health impact of wearing facemasks. Controversies over whether or not schools should be closed. Inadequate public health information for ethnic minority communities. The origins of Donald Trump's wealth.

No, this isn't a review of a book about 2020, it's a review of a book on the misnamed Spanish flu of the early twentieth century. Long treated as a historical quirk - that mostly forgotten thing which killed more people than the First World War - the global pandemic has become rather more newsworthy since we've faced a similar challenge a century on.

Many of the parallels between then and now are striking, though the one big difference - the huge advances in medical science and in public health expertise - make the outcome mercifully different.

Laura Spinney's Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World is a great and highly accessible guide to one of the twentieth century's greatest tragedies.

It is not a detailed academic study. Statistics, for example, are frequently only...

United Kingdom on Jun 13, 2020

Bernie Gourley: Before the present-day COVID-19 pandemic, the Spanish Flu of 1918 seemed to be a largely forgotten historical footnote. It was overshadowed by its more explosive, if less lethal, co-event, World War I – the war that was fallaciously believed to hold the promise of ending all wars. Furthermore, Spanish Flu never achieved the mystique of the Black Death. In fact, among the fascinating questions this book examines is why such a world-changing event isn’t more diligently studied. Of course, these days there is a sort of grim desire to understand what happened in 1918 and what – if any – lessons can be learned.

[Which isn’t to suggest that that Influzena virus pandemic was perfectly analogous to the present Coronavirus pandemic. In 1918, science was still at a state in which there remained debate about whether the disease resulted from a bacterium or a virus, and -- in some sense -- it didn’t matter because they didn’t have good treatments for either. For COVID, we had accurate tests in short order, and will no doubt have a vaccine at some point in the coming months. That said, I’m not dismissive of COVID-19. As I understand it, COVID’s R-nought (reproductive...

India on Jun 01, 2020

lisaleo (Lisa Yount): I bought this book and started reading it in mid-March 2020, just as it was becoming clear that the coronavirus pandemic was becoming a Very Big Deal, because the 1918 “Spanish” flu pandemic (Spinney explains that wherever the pandemic started, it wasn’t Spain) was the only one I knew of that affected the U.S. and other industrialized countries and occurred in what could—very loosely—be called modern times, and I wanted to have some idea of what might be in store. I can recommend this book, at least as a starting place, to anyone who feels the same… and I’m sure there are many.

It's important to keep in mind that the virus that caused the 1918 pandemic is NOT the same as the one that causes COVID-19, or even closely related, and—probably even more important—that pandemic, even in industrialized countries, did NOT take place in anything like the society that exists now. For instance, in the America of 1918, cars were still new; the germ theory was still new (and doubtful) to a lot of people, including a fair number of doctors; there were no antibiotics (which might at least have stopped some of the pneumonia complications), let alone antiviral drugs; the...

United States on Apr 01, 2020

P. Dailey: Pete Dailey
Professor Robert Siegel
W20-MLA-352-Extra Extra Credit Book Report-04
19 March 2020
Pale Rider Review
The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic is the subject of Laura Spinney’s 2017 book, Pale Rider. Spinney is a science journalist in Europe. She brings the kind of story-telling one would expect from a Sunday feature in a major newspaper. She gives the reader the most salient take-aways in the lede, and then keeps the reader engaged with vivid personal accounts like an investigative reporter lining up quotes from her sources. The subtitle, The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World is the paratextual headline and thesis of the work. The author contends that the pandemic spawned universal healthcare, alternative medicine, renewed emphasis on experiencing the outdoors, the pursuit of fitness and interest in sport, and a 20th century focus in the arts on illness and the frailty of the human body.
Spinney starts by providing some context, including some history of disease and more importantly, humankind’s scientific understanding of infectious disease. She identifies the sociodynamics of civilization’s development, and links them to the evolution of...

United States on Mar 19, 2020

Crawford Kilian: This review was first published in The Tyee https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2017/09/15/Pandemics-Politics-Spanish-Flu/ on September 15, 2017:

“The Spanish flu,” Laura Spinney tells us, “infected one in three people on earth, or 500 million human beings. Between the first case recorded on 4 March 1918 and the last sometime in March 1920, it killed 50-100 million, or between 2.5 and 5 per cent of the global population — a range that reflects the uncertainty that still surrounds it. …It was the greatest tidal wave of death since the Black Death, perhaps in the whole of human history.”

Yet when it was over, a kind of stunned silence fell on the survivors. People might talk about the carnage of the First World War and the resulting revolutions, but not about the much greater slaughter they had personally witnessed in their own homes and workplaces. My own grandparents, who had small children in 1918 and ’19, never mentioned the flu pandemic.

Part of that silence is thanks to the human tendency to pay more attention to some deaths than to others. The 3,000 deaths in the 9/11 attack are trivial compared to the 64,000 drug-overdose deaths the U.S. suffered...

Canada on Sep 16, 2017