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Diagnosis: Marriage
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Spanish flu -- sounds so quaint. Yet in 1918, the Spanish flu wiped out 40 million people. It killed more American soldiers than the Kaiser. Yet, history forgets the disease. Hemingway wrote great stories about WWI combat, but no great works about the flu. Kolata's book tries to answer the question, "Why is the Spanish flu forgotten?" Her book makes a reader consider that the true history of mankind is a chronicle of various diseases' attempts to wipe us out. For this, and many other reasons, "Flu" is the last book you want to read this winter.

Flu: The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused it. By Gina Kolata Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 330 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

I did not have the great year 2000 flu when I began her book. I did not have it when I was finished. But shortly after I spoke with her (by phone), the flu struck. I don't believe the book made me sick. But I now recall certain passages such as: "William Sproat thought little of the attack of diarrhea that struck him on Saturday, October 23, 1831. He recovered immediately and simply put it out of his mind." By dinner time, it was another story. William Sproat was racked by "agonizing stomach cramps ... Sproat doubled over in pain, and a watery, white-speckled diarrhea poured from his bowels, seemingly gallons of it. Each attack was heralded by violent intestinal spasms. He began vomiting. Sproat barely made it home, where he crawled into bed, shivering with fever, writhing in pain." Five days later, Sproat was dead. Of cholera.

Thanks to Kolata's book, I now know that the great year 2000 flu feels exactly like cholera. Many nights I lay awake at 3 a.m. -- feverish, sweating, eyes hurting, hacking up phlegm and worse -- realizing that not only do I feel like William Sproat, but I'm also the equal to one of those Eskimos buried in the permafrost since 1918. Kolata's book made me see how a considerable percentage of mankind's dead died of forms of the flu. The 2000 flu is the ultimate equalizer between the living and the dead.

Yet this realization only rubs my nose in a maddening paradox: The flu is the essence of life. Yes. A flu virus has no consciousness. No brains. No animal instincts. Yet it possesses a fiercer hunger for life than I do. Is this flu the essence of God or the devil?

I explored this notion with Gina Kolata in an interview. I invite you to read our talk with ironic detachment. Neither one of us guessed how sick I would soon be after the interview was finished.

Your book was really scary. Were you worried about catching the flu while you wrote it?

No. You know how some people are constitutionally gloomy? Well I'm constitutionally the other way. I'm obnoxious. I never get sick.

I'm that way. But when I first started the book I thought, I can't read this. I'm going to get sick. [Ha! Little did I know ...]

This is how I rationalize things. I'm naturally immune to smallpox. They couldn't vaccinate me. It never took. Maybe I'm naturally immune to the flu. Who knows?

Why does America have historical amnesia about the Spanish flu?

That's a really good question. I have two ideas. One: That it was just part of the nightmare of World War I. And when it was over people badly wanted to forget it. Every time I talk about this book on radio shows, people call in, 'My parents died.' There are all these family tragedies. In a sense, the Spanish flu is a personal tragedy rather than a historical one. That brings me to my other hypothesis and that is the 'great man of history' theory. No great leader was killed by the Spanish flu. Every side died equally during World War I. It was sort of historically neutral. Historians tend to emphasize the big events like battles and leaders, while all across the world children were losing parents. Families were being decimated.

You could write the history of the planet as sickness.

That would be interesting, wouldn't it.

A fact in your book amazed me -- until this century every major city kept being depopulated by diseases.

That surprised me too. I didn't realize that cities couldn't even maintain their populations. All this stuff really surprised me. Why, when we study history, we don't learn how public health measures make such a difference until something like the flu comes along and makes it all seem like a joke?

Did you get a flu shot?

I did this year -- for the first time. Flu shots got a really bad name because in the '60s and '70s they weren't good at guessing what the flu was going to be.

Then Gerald Ford's swine flu fiasco [the epidemic that never materialized] in 1978 made everyone sick.

That's when I first decided that I never wanted a flu shot. They were immunizing people against the flu that never came, and then there was the whole threat of nerve diseases from the shots. Why would I want that?

If some new fatal flu appears, the shots aren't going to work are they?

That's what's so scary. They have to know six months in advance to make enough for everybody.

Next page | Do we have to wear space helmets to protect ourselves from the flu?