Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World
Laura Spinney
Top 10 Best Quotes
“What the Spanish flu taught us, in essence, is that another flu pandemic is inevitable, but whether it kills 10 million or 100 million will be determined by the world into which it emerges.”
“The Spanish flu is remembered personally, not collectively. Not as a historical disaster, but as millions of discrete, private tragedies.”
“Your best chance of survival was to be utterly selfish.”
“To try to prevent some of these problems, in 2015 the World Health Organization issued guidelines stipulating that disease names should not make reference to specific places, people, animals or food.”
“One 2007 study showed that public health measures such as banning mass gatherings and imposing the wearing of masks collectively cut the death toll in some American cities by up to 50 per cent (the US was much better at imposing such measures than Europe). The timing of the measures was critical, however. They had to be introduced early, and kept in place until after the danger had passed. If they were lifted too soon, the virus was presented with a fresh supply of immunologically naive hosts, and the city experienced a second peak of death.9”
“Most of the death occurred in the thirteen weeks between mid-September and mid-December 1918. It was broad in space and shallow in time, compared to a narrow, deep war.”
“Hippocrates argued that the causes of disease were physical, and that they could be divined by observing a patient’s symptoms.”
“Hippocrates argued that the causes of disease were physical, and that they could be divined by observing a patient’s symptoms. He and his disciples introduced a system for classifying diseases, which is why he is often referred to as the father of western medicine: he was responsible for the notions of diagnosis and treatment that still underpin medicine today (he also left us with a code of medical ethics, the Hippocratic Oath, from which we have the promise made by newly qualified doctors to ‘do no harm’).”
“Cordon sanitaire. Isolation. Quarantine. These are age-old concepts that human beings have been putting into practice since long before they understood the nature of the agents of contagion, long before they even considered epidemics to be acts of God. In fact, we may have had strategies for distancing ourselves from sources of infection since before we were strictly human.”
“Assuming that you had a place you could call home, the optimal strategy was to stay there (but not immure yourself), not answer the door (especially to doctors), jealously guard your hoard of food and water, and ignore all pleas for help. Not only would this improve your own chances of staying alive, but if everyone did it, the density of susceptible individuals would soon fall below the threshold required to sustain the epidemic, and it would extinguish itself.”
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