Vivid history of U.S. epidemic of 1918 is also a cautionary tale for our times

01:00 AM EST on Sunday, February 29, 2004

BY LUTHER SPOEHR
Special to The Journal

THE GREAT INFLUENZA: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, by John M. Barry. 546 pages. Viking. $29.95.

The flu pandemic of 1918-1919 started during the Great War and killed many more people than the war did. Probably originating in a "mutant swarm" of viruses in remote Haskell, Kansas, it swept around the world, striking especially viciously at military installations and cities.

The statistics are hypnotizing, horrifying, almost incomprehensible. About 58,000 American soldiers died in the entire Vietnam War; influenza killed more doughboys than that in three months. "Influenza," says John Barry, "killed more people in a year than the Black Death of the Middle Ages killed in a century; it killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty-four years."

It killed quickly: many victims died within hours of experiencing the first symptoms. It killed cruelly: victims suffered excruciating pain and turned blue-black from lack of oxygen. It killed perversely: "Roughly half of those who died were young men and women in the prime of their life, in their twenties and thirties." It killed so many so quickly that in some cities bodies awaiting burial were piled "like cord wood." And then it slipped away.

Rhode Island native John Barry has a gift for describing and explaining the contexts and ramifications of natural disasters. His Rising Tide, a prize-winning account of the great Mississippi flood of 1927, not only told how wrathful nature swept people away, but also rendered poignantly and pointedly the politics, economics and engineering behind a catastrophe that was not merely "natural."

The Great Influenza focuses especially on the medical researchers -- William Welch, Simon Flexner, and the generation they trained at The Johns Hopkins and the Rockefeller Institute -- who struggled to understand this lethal disease and prevent a greater disaster. Despite limited success, their work led to far greater understanding of how viruses propagate, mutate and spread. What we now know about SARS and similar threats derives from their heroic efforts.

Barry's energetic, lucid prose moves the story along. (A good thing, given that he traces the history of medicine from the time of Hippocrates and Galen through the transformation of American medical education before getting to his subject.) Although the narrative flags a little in the middle -- even suffering vividly portrayed can become redundant -- it picks up again with his argument that even peace and postwar security were victims: President Woodrow Wilson's ailments at the Versailles Peace Conference, Barry contends, were probably flu-related and contributed to his ineffectiveness there.

This sympathetic treatment of Wilson contrasts sharply with Barry's stinging portrait earlier in the book -- he presents as bloodthirsty a version of the president as I have ever encountered. But certainly the war effort that he led, with its censorship and military single-mindedness, helped to place soldiers and civilians at the mercy of the influenza.

Barry doesn't pound his pulpit about the obvious relevance of all this to our own time -- he doesn't have to. His important story stands solidly and eloquently on its own as a work of history and a cautionary tale.

Luther Spoehr, who wouldn't be here if his grandfather had not survived a bout with the Great Influenza at age 25, teaches at Brown University.