Excerpt from The Great Influenza by John M. Barry, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Not until late (very late) in the nineteenth century, did a virtual handful of leaders of American medical science begin to plan a revolution that transformed American medicine from the most backward in the developed world into the best in the world.

William James, who was a friend of (and whose son would work for) several of these men, wrote that the collecting of a critical mass of men of genius could make a whole civilization "vibrate and shake." These men intended to, and would, shake the world.

To do so required not only intelligence and training but real courage, the courage to relinquish all support and all authority. Or perhaps it required only recklessness.

In Faust, Goethe wrote,

"Tis writ, 'In the beginning was the Word.'
I Pause, to wonder what is here inferred.
The Word I cannot set supremely high:
A new translation I will try.
I read, if by the spirit, I am taught,
This sense, 'In the beginning was the Thought. . . .'"

Upon "the Word" rested authority, stability, and law; "the Thought" roiled and ripped apart and created without knowledge or concern of what it would create.

Shortly before the Great War began, the men who so wanted to transform American medicine succeeded. They created a system that could produce people capable of thinking in a new way, capable of challenging the natural order. They, together with the first generation of scientists they had trained (Paul Lewis and his few peers) formed a cadre who stood on alert, hoping against but expecting and preparing for the eruption of an epidemic.

When it came, they placed their lives in the path of the disease and applied all their knowledge and powers to defeat it. As it overwhelmed them, they concentrated on constructing the body of knowledge necessary to eventually triumph. For the scientific knowledge that ultimately came out of the influenza pandemic pointed directly (and still points) to much that lies in medicine's future.

Part I
The Warriors
Chapter One

On September 12, 1876, the crowd overflowing the auditorium of Baltimore's Academy of Music was in a mood of hopeful excitement, but excitement without frivolity. Indeed, despite an unusual number of women in attendance, many of them from the uppermost reaches of local society, a reporter noted, "There was no display of dress or fashion." For this occasion had serious purpose. It was to mark the launching of the Johns Hopkins University, an institution whose leaders intended not simply to found a new university but to change all of American education; indeed, they sought considerably more than that. They planned to change the way in which Americans tried to understand and grapple with nature. The keynote speaker, the English scientist Thomas H. Huxley, personified their goals.

The import was not lost on the nation. Many newspapers, including the New York Times, had reporters covering this event. After it, they would print Huxley's address in full.

For the nation was then, as it so often has been, at war with itself; in fact it was engaged in different wars simultaneously, each being waged on several fronts, wars that ran along the fault lines of modern America.

One involved expansion and race. In the Dakotas, George Armstrong Custer had just led the Seventh Cavalry to its destruction at the hands of primitive savages resisting encroachment of the white man. The day Huxley spoke, the front page of the Washington Star reported that "the hostile Sioux, well fed and well armed" had just carried out "a massacre of miners."

In the South a far more important but equally savage war was being waged as white Democrats sought "redemption" from Reconstruction in anticipation of the presidential election. Throughout the South "rifle clubs," "saber clubs," and "rifle teams" of former Confederates were being organized into infantry and cavalry units. Already accounts of intimidation, beatings, whippings, and murder directed against Republicans and blacks had surfaced. After the murder of three hundred black men in a single Mississippi county, one man, convinced that words from the Democrats' own mouths would convince the world of their design, pleaded with the New York Times, "For God's sake publish the testimony of the Democrats before the Grand Jury."

Copyright John M Barry 2004. All rights reserved