Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed The World, Laura Spinney, c. 2017.

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed The World, Laura Spinney, c. 2017. 

Introduction: The Elephant In The Room 

Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, November 9, 1918: À mort Guillaume! 

Same day: Guillaume Apollinaire lay on his deathbed -- the leading light of the French avant-garde movement, the man who invented the term "surrealist" and inspired such figures as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, he had signed up to fight in 1914. Having survived a shrapnel wound to the head and the drilling of a hole into his skull, he died of Spanish flu at the age of thirty-eight, and was declared a mort pour la France."

His funeral: four days later, two days after the armistice was signed. 

Tears come to my eyes when I read that / transcribed that --  it reminds me of how much I've read over the years and how I love Europe, particularly Yorkshire. Oh, wow.

Spanish flu: 

• infected one in three people on earth;
• = 500 million human beings;
• Fauci knew that; his detractors did not;
• first recorded case, March 4, 1918 and the last sometime in March, 1920: it killed 50 - 100 million people or between 2.5 and 5 percent of the global population.
• it surpassed the First World War (17 million dead); the Second World War (60 million dead) and possibly both put together. It was the greatest tidal wave of death since the Black Death, perhaps in the whole of human history.
• broad in space; shallow in time, compared to a narrow (geographically), deep (in time, dragged on and on) war 
• most deaths occurred in the 13 weeks between mid-September and mid-December, 1918
• worldwide 

Page 9: a linear narrative won't do; what's needed is something closer to the way that women in southern Africa discuss an important even in the life of their community -- The Jewish text, the Talmud, is organized in a similar way. On each page, a colun of ancient text is surrounded by commentaries, then by commentaries on the commentaries, in ever-increasing circles, until the central idea has been woven throgh space and time, into the fabrice of communal memory. [Makes me think of Hunter S Thompson's Hell's Angels.] (There may be another reason why the African historian Terence Ranger proposed a feminised history of the Spanish flu: it was generally women who nursed the ill. They were the ones who registered the sights and sounds of the sickroom, who laid out the dead and took int he orphans. They were the link between the personal and the collective.) 

That is the theme of this book: p. 6. 

It still bothers me that Fauci was so denigrated / demeaned. 

Jinns, page 5: Jinns (or djinn/genies) are supernatural beings from Arabic/Islamic lore, created from smokeless fire, existing unseen alongside humans, possessing free will, and capable of good or evil, often depicted with powers like shapeshifting, inhabiting different realms, and influencing humanity, differing from Western "genies" by not being inherently wish-granting but by having complex roles in culture, religion, and folklore. 

It will be interesting read what Laura Spinney was writing in 2016 - 2017, years before Covid-9. 

"Part Eight, "Roscoe's Legacy," looks forward to a future battle -- the next flu pandemic --envisaging what ne weapons we will carry into it, and what is likely to be our Achilles heel. "Wow, how prescient. 

Page 8: It is often said that the First World War killed Romanticism and faith in progress, but if science facilitated inustrial-scale slaughter in the form of the war, it also failed to prevent it in the form of the Spanish flu.  

Part One: The Unwalled City

1. Coughs and Sneezes

Begins: 412 BC, Perinthus, a port city on the Sea of Marmara in what was then northern Greece. The Perinthians reported other symptoms too, sore throat, aches, difficulty swallowing, paralysis of the legs, an inability to see at night. A doctor called hippocrates jotted them all down, and the "Cough of Perinthus" became the first written description -- probably -- of influenza.  

2. The Monads of Leibniz