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The Great Influenza
- The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 19 hrs and 26 mins
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Publisher's summary
In the winter of 1918, at the height of World War I, history's most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has killed in 24 years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision between modern science and epidemic disease.
Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research, The Great Influenza weaves together multiple narratives, with characters ranging from William Welch, founder of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, to John D. Rockefeller and Woodrow Wilson. Ultimately a tale of triumph amid tragedy, this crisis provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon.
Critic reviews
"Monumental...powerfully intelligent...not just a masterful narrative...but also an authoritative and disturbing morality tale." (Chicago Tribune)
"Easily our fullest, richest, most panoramic history of the subject." (The New York Times Book Review)
"Hypnotizing, horrifying, energetic, lucid prose...." (Providence Observer)
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The Butchering Art
- Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
- By: Lindsey Fitzharris
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of 19th-century surgery on the eve of profound transformation. She conjures up early operating theaters - no place for the squeamish - and surgeons, working before anesthesia, who were lauded for their speed and brute strength. They were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. A young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister would solve the deadly riddle and change the course of history.
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Not one boring moment!
- By WRWF on 12-22-17
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Asleep
- The Forgotten Epidemic That Became Medicine’s Greatest Mystery
- By: Molly Caldwell Crosby
- Narrated by: Christian Rummel
- Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1918, a world war raged, and a lethal strain of influenza circled the globe. In the midst of all this death, a bizarre disease appeared in Europe. Eventually known as encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness, it spread worldwide, leaving millions dead or locked in institutions. Then, in 1927, it disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. Asleep, set in 1920s and '30s New York, follows a group of neurologists through hospitals and asylums as they try to solve this epidemic and treat its victims - who learned the worst fate was not dying of it, but surviving it.
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Scary, and still unsolved, medical mystery
- By joyce on 12-14-14
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The Family That Couldn't Sleep
- A Medical Mystery
- By: D.T. Max
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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For 200 years, a noble Venetian family has suffered from an inherited disease that strikes their members in middle age, stealing their sleep, eating holes in their brains, and ending their lives in a matter of months. In Papua New Guinea, a primitive tribe is nearly obliterated by a sickness whose chief symptom is uncontrollable laughter. Across Europe, millions of sheep rub their fleeces raw before collapsing. What these strange conditions share is their cause: prions.
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A great scientific mystery
- By David on 11-04-06
By: D.T. Max
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The Secret History of the War on Cancer
- By: Devra Davis Ph.D.
- Narrated by: Pam Ward
- Length: 19 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The War on Cancer was run by leaders of industries that made cancer-causing products and sometimes also profited from drugs and technologies for finding and treating the disease. Filled with compelling personalities and never-before-revealed information, The Secret History of the War on Cancer shows how we began fighting the wrong war, with the wrong weapons, against the wrong enemies, a legacy that persists to this day.
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Silly Book
- By Adam Smith on 12-24-14
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The Moth in the Iron Lung
- A Biography of Polio
- By: Forrest Maready
- Narrated by: Forrest Maready
- Length: 5 hrs and 54 mins
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A fascinating account of the world’s most famous disease - polio - told as you have never heard it before. Epidemics of paralysis began to rage in the early 1900s, seemingly out of nowhere. Doctors, parents, and health officials were at a loss to explain why this formerly unheard-of disease began paralyzing so many children. Why did this disease start to become such a horrible problem during the late 1800s? Why did it affect children more often than adults? Why was it originally called teething paralysis by mothers and their doctors?
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Root Cause
- By Circlekay1 Gulfport MS on 10-24-19
By: Forrest Maready
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Beating Back the Devil
- By: Maryn McKenna
- Narrated by: Ellen Archer
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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The universal instinct is to run from an outbreak of disease. These doctors run toward it. They always keep a bag packed. They seldom have more than 24 hours before they are dispatched. They are told only their country of destination and the epidemic they will tackle when they get there.
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Interesting Stuff - Only criticism is pacing
- By Tim on 07-23-05
By: Maryn McKenna
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The Great War and the Birth of Modern Medicine
- A History
- By: Thomas Helling MD
- Narrated by: Mack Sanderson
- Length: 11 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The Great War of 1914-1918 burst on the European scene with a brutality to mankind not yet witnessed by the civilized world. Modern warfare was no longer the stuff of chivalry and honor; it was a mutilative, deadly, and humbling exercise to wipe out the very presence of humanity. Suddenly, thousands upon thousands of maimed, beaten, and bleeding men surged into aid stations and hospitals with injuries unimaginable in their scope and destruction. Doctors scrambled to find some way to salvage not only life but limb.
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Interesting but weirdly sexist?
- By J-Murphy on 07-19-22
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The Fatal Strain
- On the Trail of Avian Flu and the Coming Pandemic
- By: Alan Sipress
- Narrated by: George K. Wilson
- Length: 14 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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When avian flu began spreading across Asia in the early 2000s, it reawakened fears that had lain dormant for nearly a century. During the outbreak's deadliest years, Alan Sipress chased the virus as it infiltrated remote jungle villages and teeming cities and saw its mysteries elude the world's top scientists. In The Fatal Strain, Sipress details how socioeconomic and political realities in Asia make it the perfect petri dish in which the fast-mutating strain can become easily communicable among humans.
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Narrator comments
- By Don on 01-10-10
By: Alan Sipress
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Get Well Soon
- History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them
- By: Jennifer Wright
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
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In 1518, in a small town in Alsace, Frau Troffea began dancing and didn't stop. She danced until she was carried away six days later, and soon 34 more villagers joined her. Then more. In a month more than 400 people had been stricken by the mysterious dancing plague. In late-19th-century England an eccentric gentleman founded the No Nose Club in his gracious townhome - a social club for those who had lost their noses, and other body parts, to the plague of syphilis for which there was then no cure.
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Didn't know syphilis could be so fascinating.
- By Kindle Customer on 02-09-17
By: Jennifer Wright
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What listeners say about The Great Influenza
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- L. Dicken
- 11-05-12
I learned a lot, I didn't know.
Where does The Great Influenza rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
I would put it in the upper middle, good but not the best. I still enjoyed it a lot. I would recommend it to anyone to finds the subject matter interesting.
What was one of the most memorable moments of The Great Influenza?
The amount of mistakes the country's leaders made in under estimating the strength of the flu. Their thoughts were on the WW1 and how to win it. They went and had a 2 mile long War Bond parade when people were already dropping dead from the flu. This made it spread so much faster.
Have you listened to any of Scott Brick’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
no, I have not.
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
The hopelessness, some people were so sick themselves that they could not carry their loved ones corpses out of their NY apts and they were forced to lay in the same room as the dead. The scary thing is this could so easily happen again and spread so much quicker. We have no really major way to fight it.
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- Tim
- 12-12-12
Got The Sniffles
As I write this, I'm getting over the sniffles, even though I got the flu shot. I could not put "The Great Influenza" down, because it was so interesting. If you want to know on how the Influenza virus got started and how we finally got control of it, after millions of deaths, then you are in for a treat. Just get ready to be frightened as you cough and feel sick because who hasn't gotten sick from the flu..
Great history on medicine and how the medical field drastically improved because of the flu virus.
Even a fictional writer, such as Stephen King couldn't write this horrified story that plague the States in 1918 and almost demolished the existing of man.
At the time, the flu pandemic was a war that reached all boarders and still does..
Even today, the flu virus is adapting and changing and killing more and more of its victims.
I might be a tad bit paranoid, but another plague is coming and it is just a matter of time.
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- William
- 04-12-20
Lessons Not Learned
This is the book that moved President George W. Bush to make a speech in November 2005 to set up plans for the federal government to prepare for a future pandemic. The 1918 influenza pandemic was just the flu, but it spread throughout the world with rapid speed and came in waves not fading out for almost 2 years. And, though it was “just the flu,” it was an especially virulent strain much worse than any kind of flu we’ve faced since. It could kill within 12 hours of first symptoms in its most virulent form, though it was usually 24-48 hours. People could wake up in the morning just feeling a little uncomfortable and suddenly collapse while walking, fall off a horse, or collapse at the wheel of a streetcar. The lungs were destroyed so rapidly that people turned blue or even black from lack of oxygen in the blood. Sometimes it reached the brain and, even in survivors, left many with reduced mental ability. And, like any influenza, it mutates rapidly so that in any year, the type of flu at the end of the flu season will not be exactly the same as the strain at the beginning of the season. The 1918 epidemic killed more people than any other epidemic in history in numbers (though not in percentage of population), including the plagues of the middle ages. And, though it was commonly called “The Spanish Flu,” it most likely started, not in Spain but in Kansas. The first outbreak was severe, but still relatively mild compared to the second and third waves.
It could have been worse. In the decade after the Civil War, medicine in the US was far behind its European counterpart. Almost no medical schools were connected to a university. Most were privately owned and students graduated without ever touching a patient or cadaver. The requirements to enter medical school were more lenient than getting into most high schools. The only standard was whether the student could pay tuition (and faculty salaries came from the students in their class, not from the school). Students didn’t even have to pass a medical exam to graduate. No medical schools had any research program or laboratory. While the scientific method was being applied to medical research in Europe, there was huge resistance to applying science to the study of disease in America. When the President of Harvard in 1876 criticized the dismal and horrible state of medical education in the US, he was widely criticized and was unable to make any reforms. But, in 1873 Johns Hopkins left a $7 million trust in his will to found a university and half of that was to go to founding a hospital connected to the university. The university opened in 1876, but it was the opening of its medical school in 1893 that was most significant. Its first dean was William Welch and he determined that it would focus on research and apply the scientific method to understanding the causes of disease. Many of his students would go on to found other medical schools and research laboratories funded by Rockefeller, Carnegie, and other philanthropists. By 1918, the quality of medical care and the research being done in America had caught up with and surpassed many Europe’s most prominent institutions. As soon as the reports of a new disease started appearing (and most believed that this couldn’t be “just the flu”), teams of researchers in American and Europe immediately got down to the task. The basics of what to do to slow the spread were learned early, but finding the cause and coming up with a cure was much slower and more difficult. The virus pathogen was not discovered until a decade later and research related to this helped us in many more areas and led to the discovery that DNA is the blueprint for each living thing.
It also could have been much better. The earliest major outbreaks were in military training camps (the US had just entered WW I) and the Army had one of the best epidemiologists of the time, (Alabamian, Dr. William Gorgas) who brought Yellow Fever and Malaria under control during the construction of the Panama Canal). Dr. Gorgas repeatedly urged quarantine of the affected camps, separation of the infected and those exposed to them, more distance between beds, some sort of barrier between beds, masks, etc. Those were sometimes followed but often ignored. But, the first outbreaks were very virulent and rapid spreading, but seldom lethal, so that led many to just believe that it was too costly to implement these measures and that they should just let it run its course. When it did start to become much more lethal, it was then harder to change people’s minds. In addition, the Wilson administration instituted censorship to a level previously unseen in America, and passed laws allowing prosecution with severe penalties on anyone who criticized the government in any way in order to avoid affecting morale during the war. European governments were doing the same thing, so that the first time most people heard about a flu epidemic was coming from Spanish newspapers (Spain was neutral and without censorship) which is why it came to be known as the Spanish Flu. Even as it became obvious that people were dying at alarming rates, the message from the government was that it was under control, that a cure was coming soon, that it was just in a few localized areas, etc. Researchers and medical professionals continued to push for people to stay indoors, to quarantine those exposed, to wear masks, to keep some distance between people, to avoid handshakes, etc., most government leaders ignored their advice. Even as the war was ending, the military and the government was unwilling to make any adjustments. Men were crowded onto troop ships with no quarantine or waiting times despite desperate pleas from medical authorities resulting in hundreds of burials at sea during the short trip across the Atlantic. It’s interesting though that in places where the seriousness of the epidemic was communicated with people, the death toll was much less than those places where it was hidden or minimized. And, where the messages were more rosy, people began to lose trust in the government and in each other. People refused to take in orphans or bring food to families that were sick. Children starved because parents were unable to get out of bed and eventually died. The numbers were mind-numbing in some places. In Philadelphia, almost 5,000 died in one week at the height of the pandemic. If the same percentages applied to today, it would like 200-400 million people dying worldwide.
The book does a great job of explaining things in terms a layman can understand. It deals with the disease, the research, the politics, and the effects it had on the world afterwards. Even President Wilson got the disease during peace talks in Europe at the end of the war, leaving him out of important negotiations near the end and resulting in him almost completely giving up on the principles that he had originally said were non-negotiable and resulting in the heavy reparations on Germany that led to the next world war. At the end of the book is a chilling afterward in which the author warns that another pandemic was inevitable and that the world was currently unprepared for it (the book was published in 2004). Almost to the letter, every recommendation is one of the things that we are searching for today. It recommends that government should stockpile certain things like ventilators, face masks, protective gear, etc., and then at the first hint of an outbreak appoint a commission to oversee distribution of supplies to where it is most needed. It recommends a research group to continuously oversee research animal viruses that could be upcoming pandemic candidates (which Bush did, and Trump dismantled) as well as a watchdog group to watch for and give advance warning of any outbreak around the world (also part of the group dismantled by Trump).
At the same time, it was encouraging and made me feel grateful. We are currently facing the Covid-19 pandemic (a virus of a completely different type than the influenza virus), and no projection has it becoming as serious as the 1918 pandemic. We are extremely fortunate, but hopefully this time we will not only learn about the disease itself, but learn that we cannot relax our guard and that it’s worth spending money on prevention and even that when a potential epidemic turns out to be not so serious, it’s not an indication that our precautions were wasted but that they succeeded. I recommend this book not to scare people but to encourage them.
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- Franklin
- 04-11-20
trust science and speak truth, make America great
Trust science and speak truth. Make America Great Again. Dump the orange egomaniac before he kills us all!!!!!
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- C. M.
- 04-17-20
Detailed Medical history
I am still listening to this book. It’s pretty detailed on the history of American medicine, then how viruses, influenza, inoculation, etc. infects. I don’t know that I would ready this book. The information is valuable and informative. It’s great to listen to while I work at home.
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- Joe Parlett
- 10-09-21
Hauntingly Prophetic
1918 or 2020? The last chapter puts it all in focus. The detailed history is amazing.
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- Cindy
- 08-18-17
bookgirl
history you were never taught but should have. it has been forgotten but is a cautionary tale for all of us who think we are safe from pandemic.
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- Elizabeth
- 06-17-12
It's ALL SO IMPORTANT!!!
The print version much better; I found the performance emphasis on words and style very distracting. The narrater made every single fact sound all SO IMPORTANT!! It was like reading a book that someone else highlighted; someone that has a very different point of view than you. Great book, but I did not finish the audio version.
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- Theresa Winn
- 09-15-18
Outstanding listen!
I loved this book. The background history was fascinating. The flu isn't the only thing that killed...the self interests of those in positions of power are culpable as well.
The writing and narration were both outstanding. Highly recommend!
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- KS
- 04-29-18
Intriguing and Well Written
I cycle in and out of reading non fiction and fiction books. I grabbed this one on sale and from the first few hours I was hooked. Great story telling and a real emotional connection to these amazing scientist who lead the charge during this time. Great read.
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