80 pages • 2 hours read
John M. BarryThe Great Influenza
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Triumphs and Limits of Science
In the Prologue Barry notes that “medicine is not yet and may never be fully a science” (6). But the book’s first sections trace the history of medicine, moving from the primitive pseudoscience of the Middle Ages to the rigorous, research-backed field it became by the beginning of the 20th century, which surely resembles a science. Such paradoxical thinking underscores the larger theme of the work. Where science had failed at advancing knowledge and methods in the 1800s, it also failed at “curing or preventing disease” (28). Yet a certain arrogance took hold of the field, as medical schools became more rigorous and physicians better trained. There was a certainty that researchers would uncover the secret of every disease. The influenza pandemic would prove that arrogance misguided, as scientists and physicians found no way of stopping the spread of the pandemic. Lab-grown bacteria did nothing to help the immediate treatment of the disease, and no vaccine proved effective. There were not enough physicians, and even well-trained ones came up with nothing to stop the suffering. Clearly, as Victor Vaughn noted, influenza had proved “medical science” was not “on the verge of conquering disease” (403).
The other dispiriting aspect of science, of course, was the fact that science was corrupted by World War I. Researchers spent years developing poisonous gases, incendiary devices, and machine guns. Even one of the great inventions of the 20th century, the airplane, was used for purposes of war. When science was applied to the war effort for a positive effect—such as William Gorgas’s goal of preventing malaria, measles, and pneumonia outbreaks in camps and in the trenches—the advice was ignored by generals and politicians. Good science was sidelined for the war effort, even though that science could have saved lives.
However, the book does not come out against science in any way, as it is still a story about how researchers of the era “concentrated on constructing the body of knowledge necessary to eventually triumph” and contributed important knowledge that “pointed directly—and still points—to much that lies in medicine’s future” (7). The end result, then, was a triumph of science to crack the code of influenza, albeit too late to save lives in 1918 or 1919. But Barry signals that the next pandemic could turn out better if science is allowed to lead. And, if nothing else, medicine is certainly closer to a science today than it was in 1918, with physicians now knowing how to cure more ailments than they used to. Even most pneumonias, the scourge of the influenza pandemic, are preventable through vaccines these days. Thus, medical science has triumphed, even though it is still limited against viruses in general.
The Need for Truth and Leadership in Crises
While Barry admits that nothing could have prevented influenza from breaking out, he is clear that the fallout could have been prevented with better leadership and more honest communication at the local and federal levels.
Some of the leadership problems stemmed from corruption. American politics in 1917 were in a state of transition. While the Progressive Movement had cleaned up some cities and had begun to trust experts rather than laymen in various fields, other cities were still under the control of corrupt political machines like the ones ruling New York and Philadelphia. In those cities the machine picked incompetent non-scientists to run the health department. New York’s health department, for instance, was the best in the world before the machine inserted a new director, Royal Copeland, “a man with no belief in modern scientific medicine” (269). With men like Copeland running health departments, the influenza outbreak was ignored for too long while political leaders falsely reassured the public that everything was fine.
Barry equally excoriates people with far more power than men like Copeland. He writes that US President Woodrow Wilson “took no public notice of the disease” and diverted no attention from the federal government toward the disease (302). World War I, of course, compounded the problems, as all Wilson’s attention was spent on creating a total war. But the war could not really be fought during the pandemic anyway, as troops could not be trained or go to battle while ill. Still, Wilson would not do anything that might interfere with the war effort, even as that effort stalled and as the war was winding down.
To fight the war, government officials decided that morale was paramount and censored any information that could ruin morale. Thus, the public was spared the truth about the pandemic at a time when knowledge was necessary to save lives. With the press censoring all reports of the pandemic, and with leaders lying outright to the public or ignoring the pandemic, the public no longer trusted its leaders and became even more terrified of the virus and what it might be. Rumors developed that it was the plague or even a chemical weapon, and citizens had nowhere to turn for accurate information.
As Barry notes in the Afterword, “a leader must make whatever horror exists concrete,” as failure to do so will make it impossible to “break it apart” (461). It is impossible to say how many lives were lost due to Wilson’s absent leadership and the lack of honest information coming from the press and local leaders (it’s impossible to say how many lives were lost in the pandemic at all, technically), but Barry argues that Wilson’s war effort and the resulting censorship clearly exacerbated the pandemic. As the war effort itself seemed so pointless, the choice to focus on Europe while America was at war with a disease seems especially reckless and misguided. So many “senseless deaths” could have been prevented by listening to the advice of scientists at the beginning of the pandemic and by not censoring bad news (393).
The Characteristics of a Good Scientist
The Great Influenza is a book largely about the history of science and medicine, and Barry focuses the work on the contributions a handful of scientists and physicians made to the field of medicine as a whole. In doing so, he offers examples of good scientists while also exploring the very nature of science itself. Thus, one of the implicit themes in the work is the traits of a good scientist as well as what being a scientist really means.
Regarding the former, Barry envisions a scientist as having a certain way of looking at things, a clear methodology, and the ability to extrapolate deeper meanings that can lead to new discoveries. For instance, Barry notes that a “certain kind of genius” is needed by a scientist, “one that probes vertically and sees horizontally” (60). This vision enables someone to weave strands of unconnected information together to form a whole and to attack a question or piece of evidence below the surface and open new insights from that exploration. Some scientists of the era possessed one vision but not both. William Welch, for instance, could see horizontally but not vertically, while Oswald Avery was great at probing deeply but less good at connecting the pieces. Avery, however, did possess a clear methodology. And this is equally important, for methodology leads to an experiment being replicable. But, to Barry, more important still is that “a result must be not only reproducible, it must be… perhaps one should call it expandable” (263). That is, a good scientist ought to be able to take any discovery and build on it to find still another bit of knowledge.
A lot of this comes down to not just what makes a good scientist but what makes good science. Barry suggests that “all real scientists exist on the frontier” and must create all the tools and approaches on their own (262). But equally important, science is about doubt, for a scientist can never truly know anything. A scientist “can only test” (264). Inherent in that doubt, then, should be the ability to admit a mistake. William Park and Anna Williams, for instance, “were among the few” who were “willing to contradict themselves” (417). The ability to do so helped scientists as a whole move past Pfeiffer’s bacillus to discover that influenza was caused by a virus instead.
In highlighting two principal researchers, Oswald Avery and Paul Lewis, Barry seems to finally offer an assessment that different researchers have different skills (just as William Welch and Simon Flexner did in the generation before), but that all skills are applicable to lab research, so long as one can ask the right questions, synthesize information, probe methodically, and admit to uncertainty.
Barry himself embodies that last point, admitting throughout the text that it is impossible to know every detail of the pandemic, including death counts and infection rates. But like a good scientist, Barry weaves the various pieces of data and extrapolates a whole, even one mired with some doubt.
