“One in three people on earth had fallen ill. Only in the past 20 years have researchers updated old information and mined obscure journals for insight, and now that we can pore over the data, the mortality rate was far more dismal than anyone imagined. But the larger issue, as Spinney makes clear, was the lack of documentation in the places hit hardest, such as China and India.
Add to that our inadequate understanding of what was causing the illness, which left doctors powerless. It was the greatest tidal wave of death since the Black Death, perhaps in the whole of human history.” This event, she argues, created the real “Lost Generation,” borrowing the phrase coined by Gertrude Stein and made famous by Ernest Hemingway for the disillusioned expats who flocked to Paris after World War I.īut how did we forget about the flu? We can blame our forgetfulness partially on the epidemic’s timing: it occurred during the final year of World War I. “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. Spinney pulls the global pandemic from the footnotes of history. In a century that witnessed two world wars, her statement is bound to sound hyperbolic, which is exactly the point. “When asked what was the biggest disaster of the twentieth century, almost nobody answers the Spanish flu,” writes Laura Spinney in the first few pages of her book Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World.
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