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In 1918-1919 influenza raged around the globe in the worst pandemic in recorded history. Focusing on those closest to the crisis¿patients, families, communities, public health officials, nurses and doctors¿this book explores the epidemic in the United States.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Lost Worlds
- Chapter One: "Influenza has apparently become domesticated with us": Influenza, Medicine and the Public, 1890-1918
- Chapter Two: "The whole world seems up-side-down": Patients, Families, and Communities Confront the Epidemic
- Chapter Three: "Let our experience be of value to other communities": Public Health Experts, the People, and Progressivism
- Chapter Four: "The experience was one I shall never forget": Doctors, Nurses, and the Challenges of the Epidemic
- Chapter Five: "The terrible and wonderful experience": Forgetting and Remembering in the Aftermath
- Epilogue: Reckoning the Costs of Amnesia
- Abbreviations
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Nancy K. Bristow is Professor of History at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. She is the author of Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War. Bristow is the great-granddaughter of two of the pandemic's fatalities.
Summary
In 1918-1919 influenza raged around the globe in the worst pandemic in recorded history. Focusing on those closest to the crisis--patients, families, communities, public health officials, nurses and doctors--this book explores the epidemic in the United States.
Additional text
As historian Nancy K. Bristow shows in her compelling and readable new contribution to influenza scholarship, we still do not appreciate the epidemic's many legacies...Bristow's accomplishments are manifold. She segues readily between personal stories and collective experience. She develops complexity, contingency, and a multiplicity of contexts, and she does so with precision and grace. Her research is prodigious, and her writing is accessible,
jargon free, and economical. At just under two hundred pages of text, American Pandemic will appeal to undergraduates, who will love reading it, and to instructors, who will love teaching it. This fine book stands on its own as a tribute to the rich and tragic legacies that the 1918 pandemic left behind.
