Very haunting book that is eerily prescient for our current time. ( )

Inspired to read this after my step-mother said that her grandfather became anti-vax after the WW1 with the Spanish Flu. Couldn’t find anything in here about the movement at that time although a writer with no medical training in 1950s did claim it was caused by the Vaccination programme used on the troops in Texas. (Overlooking the overcrowded conditions, that plenty of unvaccinated people died from it and it did not,stem from there). I suspect a bit of retrospective justification going on here. ( )

Fascinating look at the course of the Spanish flu of 1918-19, or as it was anthromorphized in the press's cartoonish figure of the "Spanish lady", a female figure with a death's head, dressed in black flamenco-style dress and mantilla. The earliest mention of any widespread epidemic was made by Hippocrates in 412 BC and we have had epidemics and pandemics of different origins and symptoms ever since, including now. The author mentions theories as to its origin, from the possible to the conspiratorial, and much of the book is taken from the writings, letters, or memoirs of people who had either witnessed it in others or had recovered from it themselves. Katherine Anne Porter, the writer, who recovered, felt it was a turning point in her life. The world would probably be a different place if FDR or Mahatma Gandhi had not recovered from their severe bouts with the "Spanish lady". The book was very prescient concerning public health measures, which we are using today. No cure was found; the disease just burned itself out. Not until the 1990s was the genome found. Viruses were not even discovered until the 1930s. Health professionals' earlier thinking of a bacterial origin for the Spanish flu led them into blind alleys.

A little girls' jump rope skipping rhyme from that period:
"I had a little bird,
And its name was Enza.
I opened the window
And in-flew-enza." ( )

Absolutely fascinating, and that’s simply after reading the Prologue! Published on Aug 28, 2018, this is an eerie foretelling of past pandemic events, and those yet to come. Although Arnold could not predict the COVID19 pandemic of 2019-2020, the parallels the Spanish Lady, or flu, has with today’s COVID19 is uncanny. The prologue found me fascinated, and as I reach Chapter 1, I am hooked already.

The various stories take you across the globe as you get glimpses of those infected or those touched by the epidemic. Science of the day is interspersed and again, the parallels of the 1918 Flu and the 2020 Covid-19 outbreaks are amazing. A must-read.
*I received an arc from the publisher through NetGalley for an honest review ( )

This book was incredible. It is estimated 20 million people died in WWI. Just as that terrible debacle was maybe slowing down a new killer rose up to take war's place. The Spanish flu. Spanish, not because it started there, because Spain was neutral in WWI and didn't have a news blackout. I have always wondered about that. I have also always wondered how 100 million people could die of the "flu" and people know nothing of it today in the COVID era. My great aunt Katie died in 1918 of the Spanish flu. She was 18 years old. This disease was cruel. Instead of the usual flu taking the old it took young people, in the prime of life. It took others too but it especially liked people in their teens and twenties and very healthy. The brilliance of this book is not the statistics but the voices speaking from that time as they talk again and are heard. They talk of the days leading up to the flu, the parades, and the innocence. They talk of having the disease and how painful it was, they talk of watching their loved ones die from it. They talk of running out of coffins, bodies stacked like wood, mass graves, and the smell. They talked of grief. One little girl told how she loved church bells until they became synonymous with funerals. The book talked about the heroism of the medical people who fought the disease, many of them dying also. I had to stop reading this book sometimes because of the sadness I felt for these people. People are so resilient because life goes on and they got on with it. I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this book in exchange for a review. ( )