MB Civic

This magnificent book should be required reading for anyone concerned about bioterrorism and the emergence of Pandemic Influenza other potentially pandemic infections.

John M. Barry does a thrilling and sweeping job of covering the 1918 “Spanish Flu”, and the book is a true page-turner, sucking the reader in to a thrilling and engrossing and gripping story that just happens to be true. The book also has passages that verge on poetry, and glow with the beauty and clarity of truly great writing – for example, when Barry describes the way viruses take over the machinery of infected cells and lead to their destruction.

But what is really important about this book, something that is not mentioned in any of the reviews I have seen, is the way it tells the story of how the American medical education system (something Americans can still be proud of, even in these dark days) was founded, largely by one of my personal heroes: William Welch.

Welch – one of the most important medical minds ever – basically founded two pioneering institutions: The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research – which produced 14 Nobel Laureates in the 20th century – and also a new medical school, built from scratch, a school based on the great European institutions and the new science of microbiology (then transforming the world as utterly as quantum physics did) – a school that was to be the model for every single US medical school for 120 years: Johns Hopkins University.

The transformation of US medical education at the turn of the century, which began under Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, was largely due to the scandalous Flexner Report – which found shocking deficiencies in US medical education.

Barry not only tells this story (revealing shocking deficiencies that will amaze the reader), but more importantly, he puts this story where it belongs: surrounding the pandemic like a picture frame. These were the physicians on the front lines – literally, since World War I was raging as the pandemic attacked. Barry also gives us a hair-raising and very realistic feel for the scientific detective story, starring the first crop of Welch’s proteges.

The reader emerges with a very unique insight: these people were just as smart as we are, some of them a good deal smarter – but because they had a different knowledge base and much more primitive tools, they reached a number of wrong conclusions (e.g., that the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae was the pathogen causing the illness).

Barry leaves us pondering the great mystery that remains, even after the 1918 influenza virus was cloned from frozen corpses and completely sequenced genetically: Why did the epidemic stop? Even our best and brightest biomedical scientists remain mystified by that central question. It is something we really must know before the next wave of lethal microbes enters our world, either via natural pathways or by malevolent human design.

A MUST READ – recommended with utmost enthusiasm. This book will change the way you think, and it’s a ripping good read!

Bill Swiggard
(a/k/a William J Swiggard, MD, PhD)