That was for a small town in the United States, and this was a disease that touched everyone on earth. He described how he and his friends were climbing over towering stacks of wooden boxes like a play fort until his mother scolded them for disrespecting dead people in caskets that way. I remember an American Experience PBS documentary from the 1990s interviewing a now elderly man who’d been a child in the fall of 1918. To a limited degree, local policies could worsen or protect a population, but it had to take place in the context the First World War spreading the disease in the first place: all advancements of modern technology devoted to moving Chinese laborers to another hemisphere for the war effort and/or shipping infected American troops from Kansas to France to conclude another continent’s war turned a regional epidemic into a global pandemic.Įven in its own time, the three waves of shockingly virulent influenza were too big and horrible for people to comprehend. Within a tidy 295 pages, Spinney asks then attempts to answer the question, “ How did we allow ourselves to forget a tragedy of such enormity?” And put together as a single historical event, they would claim, all the misery springing from human malice between 1914 to 1945 led to up to 100 million untimely deaths in those three decades.īut, as British science journalist Laura Spinney relates in her latest book Pale Rider, the pandemic known in its time as the Spanish Flu (but definitely not originating in Spain) may have killed in three years about the same amount as we murdered each other during those 30, infecting one out of every three people on the earth while killing one-in-20 of the global population.

Now, an especially pedantic person might want to argue that WWI really was the beginning of the ‘ Second Thirty Years War‘ they might treat as bookends both world wars-roping together all battlefield deaths, all civilian bombings, every atrocity and genocide, every preventable famine and epidemic. It’s become a standard bit of 20th Century trivia that as terrible as the First World War was, the 1918 Flu Pandemic coinciding with the armistice killed more than the conflict itself.

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