It's hard to believe we've devoted so little of our memory to something that killed 50 million people. Once in a while, the 1918 flu epidemic pops up _ like a plot point in the period TV drama "Downton Abbey." But in an age before instant communications, and in the midst of that vast man-made meat grinder of death called World War I, our exhausted species buried the epidemic along with its dead. Yet with the coronavirus now on the move around the world, it's worth resurrecting the 1918 pandemic to study ourselves then, know how we reacted to it, how we learned and didn't learn from it.
Laura Spinney is a science journalist whose book "Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World," gives us what we have forgotten or never knew about this illness that killed almost three times the 18 million victims of World War I. Many millions caught the Spanish flu but survived: the king of Spain, paradoxically; Mohandas K. Gandhi; Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and Walt Disney. When you think of our alternative history had they not survived, you get a sense of how life-altering this death tsunami was for the world.
