Rating: 4 Stars ★★★★☆
Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany abdicated on 9 November 1918 and in the streets of Paris there was jubilation.
About
With a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people and a global reach, the Spanish flu of 1918–1920 was the greatest human disaster, not only of the twentieth century, but possibly in all of recorded history. And yet, in our popular conception it exists largely as a footnote to World War I.
In Pale Rider, Laura Spinney recounts the story of an overlooked pandemic, tracing it from Alaska to Brazil, from Persia to Spain, and from South Africa to Odessa. She shows how the pandemic was shaped by the interaction of a virus and the humans it encountered; and how this devastating natural experiment put both the ingenuity and the vulnerability of humans to the test.
Laura Spinney demonstrates that the Spanish flu was as significant – if not more so – as two world wars in shaping the modern world; in disrupting, and often permanently altering, global politics, race relations, family structures, and thinking across medicine, religion and the arts.
Review
We know about the Black Death that passed through Europe in the Middle Ages, but most people don’t know much about the Spanish Flu of 1918. Laura Spinney describes the story of the pandemic in frightening detail.
I knew that the flu of 1918 was terrible. I wasn’t aware of just how terrible. It killed more people worldwide than the first and second world war combined.
The Spanish flu infected one in three people on earth, or 500 million human beings. Between the first case recorded on 4 March 1918, and the last some time in March 1920, it killed 50-100 million people, or between 2.5 and 5 per cent of the global population – a range that reflects the uncertainty that still surrounds it. In terms of single events causing major loss of life, it surpassed the First World War (17 million dead), the Second World War (60 million dead) and possibly both put together. It was the greatest tidal wave of death since the Black Death, perhaps in the whole of human history.
I liked that the book tells of the impact the flu had worldwide and doesn’t just focus on Europe and North America. Because in many countries that were barely affected by the war, the flu took a terrible toll on the population.
Each country reacted differently, and depending on their approach to quarantine, were more or less successful in combating the epidemic.
Reading about the effect it had, of empty streets and corpses that could not be buried because there were just so many of them was heartbreaking – and terrifying. Because another pandemic could happen at any time. And if the virus mutates just enough, the effects could be similar.
Not just the death toll and the effects it had on people was terrible, the symptoms described in the book make your skin grow cold. It reads like no flu I ever saw. In fact, the flu was so deadly because it weakened the system so much that secondary infections had easy access.
Blue darkened to black. The black first appeared at the extemities – the hands and feet, including the nails – stole up the limbs and eventually infused the abdomen and torso. As long as you were conscious, therefore, you watched death enter at your fingertips and fill you up.
Overall, the book describes the pandemic excellently, from its origins, its effect on different countries around the world, the scientific background of the virus and what has changed since the pandemic of 1918 and whether or not we are prepared for another.
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