Pandemic Reading

The Pandemic of 2019/2020 

One of the reasons that I have not been blogging was because of the pandemic. And to be honest, I was just too lazy. I have decided to resume posting in an effort to keep my mind active. 

Because of the pandemic, my husband and I have been masking up and staying home a LOT. On February 13th of 2021, I received my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine and got the second dose on March 6th, 2021. An interesting side effect of the masking and relative isolation is that neither my husband nor myself have had as much as a cold. 

Because I got interested in Pandemics in general, I have read two books on that topic this past year. One of them is by John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History 

”Epidemiological evidence suggests that a new influenza virus originated in Haskell County, Kansas, early in 1918. Evidence further suggests that this virus traveled east across the state to a huge army base, and from there to Europe. Later it began its sweep through North America, through Europe, through South America, through Asia and Africa, through isolated islands in the Pacific, through all the wide world..."

Barry, John M.. The Great Influenza (p. 92). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

"Young men from Haskell County entered the Army and were sent to Camp Funston in Fort Riley, Kansas. “Camp Funston, the second-largest cantonment in the country, held on average fifty-six thousand green young troops. The camp was built at the confluence of the Smoky Hill and Republican Rivers, where they form the Kansas River. Like all the other training camps in the country, Funston had been thrown together in literally a few weeks in 1917. There the army prepared young men for war.” 

Barry, John M.. The Great Influenza (p. 95). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

“..Frank Macfarlane Burnet, a Nobel laureate who lived through the pandemic and spent most of his scientific career studying influenza, later concluded that the evidence was “strongly suggestive” that the 1918 influenza pandemic began in the United States, and that its spread was “intimately related to war conditions and especially the arrival of American troops in France.” Numerous other scientists agree with him. And the evidence does strongly suggest that Camp Funston experienced the first major outbreak of influenza in America; if so, the movement of men from an influenza-infested Haskell to Funston also strongly suggests Haskell as the site of origin.” Barry, John M.. The Great Influenza (p. 98). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

The John Barry book is not only a great record of the 1918 “Spanish” flu (ironic since it had at least one source in the U.S.) but also a telling of the growth of scientific medical research and medical training in the United States. I highly recommend this book. 

The other book that I have read is “A Journal of The Plague Year”, by Daniel Defoe. The plague year in question was 1665 and the location was London.  “The journal style is simple and immediate and reads like an audit for the Lord Mayor’s office at times. The recurring use of weekly mortality bills to chart the spread and speed of the disease in each parish, adds to the administrative feel and gives the book an underlying authority. Defoe collected these bills, and other plague ephemera, which must account for the great amount of detail he brings to the text. But the book reads best as an historical novel that mingles fact and fiction, as Defoe was barely five years old at the time of the events. After the mortality bills, his primary sources were the many contemporaneous accounts produced in the fifty years, or so, afterwards. His genius is to construct a gripping novel filled with detail, statistics, gossip, hearsay and half-remembered stories that is totally convincing. A good journalist, he resists the temptation to sensationalise events realising that the story is itself sensational enough. The author, signed only as 'H.F.', is the main character with few other names given. He is the ever-present narrator, right in the middle of things, gathering stories in the pubs and on the street, and we see everything through his eyes, if occasionally, somewhat voyeuristically.” (https://www.londonfictions.com/daniel-defoe-a-journal-of-the-plague-year.html) 

I liked both of the books, but have to say that the Barry book was the better of the two.