“The Great Influenza” by John M, Barry

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry was originally published in 2004 but re-released several times since then. This remarkable book describes not only the human disaster of the huge pandemic of 1918, but also the history of medicine and research in that era and the experiences of a number of prominent scientists. The edition I read was published before the Covid pandemic, so there are no comparisons, but of course I was constantly making comparisons in my mind as I read, and I was somewhat shocked at how much worse things were in 1918 than in 2020!

Medical sciences — both clinical and laboratory practices — were developing into their modern form at the time of the pandemic. Barry follows the work of several physicians and scientists, mostly in the United States at the Rockefeller Institute and at Johns Hopkins University. He also describes how medical schools and research institutions were then emerging into their modern form, and how medical theory and medical education were developing in the era from the 1890s until the First World War.

Here are five important things that I learned while reading about this painful and horrendous historic event:

1. The global death toll was at least 35 million and probably as high as 100 million people out of a world population much smaller than the current world population. (In the covid pandemic the current death toll according to the World Health Organization has been almost 7 million).
2. The initial explosion of vast numbers of cases of this highly contagious and gruesomely virulent disease took place in the late summer and autumn of 1918 at US military camps where tens of thousands of young men were being trained and prepared for the battlefields of World War I. The descriptions of the camps full of fatally sick and helpless youth, the stacks of bodies, the lines of cots between the prepared hospital beds, the lack of nurses and doctors, and the suffering of so many people is horrifying (and I can’t possibly begin to evoke the atmosphere that the detailed descriptions in the book create).
3. In some parts of the world, populations of entire villages and towns were 100% killed; for example, many Inuit towns in Alaska had no survivors. The death toll in many American cities was huge, but elsewhere it was much worse.
4. Researchers were only beginning to identify and define the existence of viruses at the time, and did not prove that the influenza cause was a virus until the pandemic was almost over. The details of the research were fascinating — desperately, the best of the scientists tried to find a cure or a vaccine to stop the epidemic, but they were totally unable to do so. Opportunistic bacteria caused secondary infections in a large number of victims, which amplified the death toll, and which also confounded the efforts to identify the infectious agent of the pandemic.
5. It’s well-known that the most devastated age group of the 1918 flu was young people from late adolescence through around age 40; in some parts of the US and Europe this group sustained death rates up to 9% of their cohort. Although common knowledge (as I’ve always heard it) believes that older people had immunity left over from a previous influenza epidemic, the author presents another, more convincing theory. This theory says that the extremely virulent virus caused an overwhelming immune response in many victims, which resulted in a “cytokine storm” when the body essentially overwhelms itself, especially destroying the lungs. (We heard of the same catastrophic result of the coronavirus in 2020.) Younger people have more vigorous immune systems, so were much more likely to succumb to this effect.

It’s often noted that the 1918 pandemic seems to be forgotten, considering how drastically it affected the entire world. Few memoirs and virtually no fiction (other than the story “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”) were written about it. It’s true that American newspapers of the time were heavily censored because of the war effort, but when the war was over, there still seemed to be little interest in the type of documentation and memory that usually follows earthshaking events. Barry discusses this a little, but in my opinion, he has no illuminating explanation for the amnesia that seems to have downplayed the impact of such a major event. It seems to me that this erasure of history isn’t happening in regard to the covid outbreak but it’s too soon to know anything.

The Great Influenza has a very similar set of topics to my recent reading of Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations by Simon Schama, which I wrote about a few days ago. I was telling a friend about the Schama book, and he recommended the book by Barry — and in fact, loaned me his copy. This explains why I read the two in quick succession!

Review © 2023 mae sander

Foreign Bodies by Simon Schama

 

Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations by Simon Schama is a fabulous book. I found it very dense -- packed with amazing detail about the history of medicine and science, but also packed with social, political, and international history, as well as presenting biographies of several scientists. The book includes amazing illustrations and early photographs. 

Schama especially concentrates on the nearly forgotten researcher Waldemar Haffkine (1860-1930), who was born and educated in Odessa in its vibrant 19th century Jewish community. With a degree in laboratory science, Haffkine then worked in the Pasteur laboratory in Paris and labs in England, and then went to India where he developed mass-produced vaccine against outbreaks of cholera and plague. He personally administered the vaccine when authorities didn’t fully support his efforts. 

Eventually Haffkine became a victim of petty bureaucratic spite backed by antisemitism, xenophobia, and general political messiness. The enemy he met was “institutional barbarism”. He experienced “the disrespect for science, the unconscionable inattentiveness to illuminating knowledge by those entrusted with public health, and those superior gentlemen who set themselves up as the custodians of imperial duty.” In sum, Haffkine eventually became the victim of “the sovereignty of the ignorant and the lazy over the persevering and the learned.” (p. 348) It’s a fascinating story and two paragraphs here are unbelievably inadequate to reflect the complexity and richness in Schama’s narrative, which covers numerous other scientists as well as Haffkine.

After reading the 400 pages of this amazing book, including the stories of many quests to conquer mass outbreaks of diseases, I feel as if I should immediately begin again and read it a second time. Even if I did reread it, I think I would miss a lot of the richness of detail and human interest. (Simon Schama's other books have made me feel the same way.) I’m baffled by how to review or even summarize such a dazzling selection of varied scenes, personalities, issues, comparisons between historic and modern events, and rivalries and conflicts between experts.

The covid-19 pandemic and the race to provide a vaccine to interrupt the disastrous spread of the disease obviously triggered Schama’s exploration of other pandemics and how science (in whatever form it took in that age) dealt with the challenges. His subject historic diseases are mainly smallpox, cholera, and bubonic plague from the 18th through the 20th century, but he brings in parallels to the successes, mistakes, and political shenanigans of the 2020 covid outbreak and how the epidemic and the vaccine were politicized.

Science in each era included men (and very few women) who were searching for the cause of the emergent or re-emerging diseases, so Schama offers amazingly accessible detail of the work of microbiologists, epidemiologists, and brave doctors and nurses who worked in clinics, laboratories, or just in villages and cities. Over time, they discovered the effecting organisms: viruses, bacteria, or the malaria parasite. In each case, researchers then had to convince establishment medical scientists or (worse yet) bureaucrats with turf to protect. Some of the non-science people held onto different theories, such as the idea that disease was a result of miasmas coming from sewers or marshes rather than from the bites of infected insects. Some of them were simply jealous or willing to steal credit for the accomplishments of others. Some used the situation to manipulate the public for dubious political gain. Never a pretty story, but totally fascinating. As the Kirkus reviewer expressed it: 

“This is a broad canvas, but Schama, a diligent and experienced historian, keeps the narrative on track, and he has a good eye for illustrative anecdotes. It adds up to a strong story that, in the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic, speaks to us all.” (source)

Foreign Bodies was published last month in England. I think it’s ridiculous that it will not be available in the US for several months, and I ordered a copy to be shipped to me from Blackwells. They offer free shipping if you are sufficiently interested to read it now, when it’s really relevant!

Review © 2023 mae sander

To be shared with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz

Zweig's Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman by Stefan Zweig, is a fascinating study, bringing together Zweig's expertise in historical research with his enjoyable skills as a writer of fiction. First published in 1932, Marie Antoinette has recently been re-published -- as have many of Zweig's other books. I enjoyed reading it and seeing the illustrations, such as the one above.

Zweig was in eclipse for quite a long time after his death in 1942, and my interest in him started shortly before this renaissance, when I read his autobiography, The World of Yesterday. It pleases me that his stories and histories, which I could then find only in an academic library in quite old editions, have now become completely accessible: for example Marie Antoinette, which I purchased as an e-book, and Magellan, which I read a few years ago (link).

Although I have read a bit about the French Revolution and what led up to it (in historic works like Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama or fiction like City of Darkness, City of Light by Marge Piercy) I was surprised at how little I knew of the central role that Queen Marie Antoinette actually played during the complex events of her time.

Marie Antoinette's character development -- as Zweig documented and brought it to life -- was portrayed in a most fascinating way. In the early years of her reign, she was a self-indulgent, pleasure seeking, irresponsible adolescent and young woman. As the Revolution began to threaten her husband the king, she developed a sense of responsibility. or as Zweig writes: "Too late, Marie Antoinette had grasped in the very depths of her soul that she was destined to become a historical figure, and this need for transcending the limitations of her own time intensified her forces to an extreme." (Kindle Locations 6223-6225).  By the end, Zweig shows her as a completely different, and highly self-aware and dignified victim.

Zweig, in my reading experience, always seems to present quite a bit about what his characters ate -- a subject I find especially interesting. Though there are many fascinating things in the book, I'll present a few of the food passages.

The illustration above, for example, shows the royal family at their dinner when their real imprisonment in a former Knights' Templar fortress in Paris called "The Temple." Zweig explains how their provisions were arranged:

There was a liberal supply of food and drink. No less than thirteen persons were appointed to minister to the pleasures of the table! At his midday meal there were at least three soups, two entrées, two roasts, four entremets, compotes, fruits, malmsey, claret, and champagne — so that in less than three months the expenses of the royal kitchen mounted up to no less than thirty-five thousand livres." (Kindle Locations 8392-8396). 

The abundance of food in their prison may have been modest compared to life in the palace, but the king was incredibly fond of good food, and never lost his appetite, even just before his inevitable death. For example, the royal family were well-provided with food during a failed attempt to flee the Revolution somewhat earlier, when a huge carriage tried to take them away from Versailles:

"The liberally stocked food baskets were opened, and a hearty breakfast was eaten off silver platters; the bones of the chickens and the empty wine bottles were disposed of through the carriage windows; the worthy guardsmen were not forgotten." (Kindle Locations 6921-6923).

On this aborted voyage, the king and queen and their children were intercepted, and returned to captivity in Versailles:

"On this June 21, 1791, Marie Antoinette, in the thirty-sixth year of her life and in the seventeenth year of her reign, for the first time entered the house of a French bourgeois. That was the only interruption of her progress from palace to palace and from prison to prison. She had first to pass through the shop, smelling of rancid oil, sausage, and spices. Then, by a sort of companion ladder, the royal party — Madame la Baronne de Korff as ostensible chief, the Queen as governess, and Louis as a bewigged servant — mounted to the first story, where there were two rooms, a bedroom and a parlor, low-ceilinged, poor-looking, and dirty." (Kindle Locations 7043-7049).

Marie Antoinette was even well-provided for during her final imprisonment in a damp cell in the Conciergerie, after the king had been beheaded and her children taken from her. As did many of her guards and jailors, the woman assigned to her in this cell was taken with her queenly behavior:

"As far as prison rules were concerned, all that the head warder’s wife had to do for the ex-Queen was to clean out her room and provide her with rough meals. This good woman, however, cooked the most dainty food she could procure; she offered to dress Marie Antoinette’s hair; every day she procured from another quarter of the town a bottle of drinking water which Marie Antoinette found preferable to that supplied in the prison." (Kindle Locations 9240-9243). 

As she was taken away to the Guillotine, Marie Antionette seemed uninterested in food, eating a few sips of soup out of politeness and sympathy for her jailor. Zweig portrays the crowds waiting to see her death, including a description of how they passed the time waiting for the spectacle: "Between times, for refreshments, one bought lemonade, rolls, or nuts. The great scene was worth a little patience." (Kindle Locations 10211-10212).

Bread, Sugar, Coffee

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama is an enormous book. I read it during the past week because I wanted to know more about the French Revolution than "Let them eat cake." Well, I did know more, but I wanted a lot more. The old cliche about Marie Antoinette does reflect accurately that the masses of people in pre-Revolutionary France struggled to get enough to eat. The first half of Citizens depicts the increasing misery of the people due to harvest failures in the 1780s, among many other trends and events. In this little tiny discussion of a brick-sized book, I'm going to explore just a few ideas on food and the Revolution.

Tax farms, not agricultural farms, presented a major problem for Louis XVI. Despite the problems of bad conditions for food production, on the whole France was prosperous; however, the tax farmers who collected taxes under contract were reaping most of the benefits of trade and economic growth. Many of the changes that led up to the Revolution represented efforts to contain financial difficulties, including the convening of delegates in various assemblies of old tradition.

Vigee Lebrun's portrait of Calonne

Louis' early efforts included the appointment of a series of ministers to straighten out his numerous financial problems. One was Calonne, who had a reputation for prodigality and opulence that didn't help with Louis' own poor public image. Schama describes Calonne's chef Olivier, who presided over a vast staff of "specialists of the table." He writes:

"There were three servants alone to look after the roasted meats, with their own assigned kitchen boy called Tintin. Calonne had a weakness for truffles, partridge and, more surprisingly 'macarony de Naples' eaten with Parmesan or Gruyère, a dish which one would have thought incompatible with lace cuffs." (p. 235 -- I read this tome in a paper book as there's no Kindle edition!)

Meanwhile, of course, the king and his vast court ate very well also, while poor and even middle-class people were facing rapidly rising prices. Even when incarcerated in the Bastille, the well-off could bring in high-quality food -- beef, chicken, fresh fruit and vegetables. Common prisoners were still fed decently, though; those imprisoned for participating in "flour war" riots in 1775 were fed "gruels and soups, sometimes lined with a string of bacon or lardy ham." (p. 392)

In contrast to Calonne, one subsequent finance minister, Necker, was widely believed to be capable of controlling this inflation; he was "a bringer of cornucopias: the man who would make solvency from bankruptcy, create work where there was unemployment and bring bread where there was famine." Necker had even "put up his personal fortune as collateral for a grain shipment" from abroad.

Necker with cornucopia

"The notion that famines were caused not by the climate but by conspiracy had a long pedigree in France. But it was never more widely shared nor more angrily expressed than in 1789. If bakers and millers who withheld their stock from the market to drive prices even higher were the immediate villains, behind them lay an even more sinister aristocratic cabal." (p. 372)

Louis dismissed Necker in 1789, also dissolving the National Assembly, infuriating those who had believed in him and had confidence in his policies and his integrity.

What I found interesting in Schama's detailed social and economic history is that during the Revolution, as before, rich people who didn't flee still ate well, while prices of bread, sugar, coffee, meat and many other commodities important to the middle and lower classes continued to rise rapidly, perhaps even more than before. Poor harvests were made worse by disruptions to the peasants (like abolishing the church and persecuting the clergy). Tropical imports like sugar and coffee became scarce when French colonies also revolted. Imports of supplementary grain for bread and imports of any still-available exotic foods were cut off by lack of function in ports caused by various Revolutionary actions and policies. The poorest people, as always, suffered the most.

A major concern during the Revolutionary period (Schama's book covers up to 1794) was hoarding, whether by farmers, dealers, shopkeepers, or ordinary citizens. During the Terror, the Convention adopted the death penalty for hoarders.  They defined "goods of the first necessity" including the basics: "bread, salt and wine," and also "butter, meat, vegetables, soap, sugar, hemp, wool, oil and vinegar. Anyone possessing stocks of this market basket was required to make a formal declaration to the authorities." Both wholesalers and retailers could be ordered to sell goods at any time. Throughout the era, and indeed in pre-Revolutionary times as well, efforts at price control met with a similar lack of success. (p. 757) Long lines for food were a reality of the day, and those with political power were able to take the best for themselves. (p. 862 and elsewhere)

As the Revolution proceeded, another responsibility of the new leaders involved supplying the large armies that they were amassing to defend France against foreign troops opposing them. This required major efforts at procurement and even production, as well as "inspirational propaganda." A soldier's daily ration theoretically was "a pound and three quarters of bread, together with a few ounces of meat, beans, or some other dried vegetable and wine or ale. If they were lucky they might get an onion and a slab of cheese, and where there was no brandy, gin or tobacco to start the day, the officers could expect trouble." (p. 765)

Festival of Reason

Food was always a necessity and present throughout various symbolic events. At a festival to rename Notre Dame de Paris the "Temple of Reason" an opera singer played the role of Liberty, seated on a bank of flowers. One writer described the smell of herrings at a similar festival in Saint-Gervais, while at Saint-Eustache "he was horrified to see 'bottles, sausages, andouilles, pâtés and other meats'" around the choir of the former church. (p. 778)

What most struck me about this quite fascinating book was one general point: that many changes that took place during the revolution were in fact very lasting, especially the economic restructuring that altered the role of the nobility and obliterated many of the remnants of feudalism, turning "lords" into "landlords" or removing nobility entirely from the economic picture, replaced by new upper class types. This change persisted even when royalty was restored.

Note: Images are from Wikipedia.

Rembrandt's Kitchen and an Ancient Royal Feast

On a visit to Amsterdam some years ago, we visited Rembrandt's house. Because Rembrandt once went bankrupt -- he was a much better painter than businessman -- the museum creators were able to reproduce his material surroundings quite effectively based on the records of his possessions made by the court. He also painted images of the material world so effectively that his works allow recreation of his daily life.

From a website about the Rembrandt house, the photos show the reconstruction of his kitchen. We can see that this kitchen is relatively modest, and in the context of the house, would not have produced lavish feasts, but rather, ordinary daily meals.

Rembrandt, who lived from 1606-1669 offers a somewhat different face of the Dutch Golden Age than did the other painters I've been thinking about. His portraits of individuals, couples, groups, and of himself seem to probe an inner person, while so many of his contemporaries used surface details to express their ideas.


A trip to the Louvre is overwhelming, but if you've made it to the rooms displaying paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, you have surely been impressed by Rembrandt's painting of an ox hanging in a butcher shop. Yes, it represents food, but it also suggests his quest for visual understanding of flesh.

Rembrandt and his contemporaries all created dramatic depictions of Biblical, Classical, and historical scenes. Using dramatic effects of light Rembrandt illuminated the most dramatic moments of a well-known scenario.

The painting of "Balshazzar's Feast" in the National Gallery in London is one of his most famous. The mysterious hand is writing on the wall, "MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN" in Hebrew letters (which Rembrandt probably learned from his many Jewish neighbors, but that's a long story for another time).

Simon Schama says that other painters had other interpretations of Belshazzar's feast and the moment of revelation:

But it was ... Rembrandt who chose the narrative climax for his great history painting, when the king sees the spectral hand inscribing its cryptic message of doom. These moments of nemesis -- invariably decoded by venerable and untainted prophets (like Daniel) -- were favorite themes of history painters. ... For Israelites, Babylonians and New Hebrews [i.e. the Dutch] alike the moral was clear. Instead of gluttonous feasting and wanton behavior, fasts of solemn penitence should be decreed. (Schama, p. 150)

Belshazzar, according to the book of Daniel, was using the vessels that he had taken from the Temple in Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, "for the profane purposes of his feast." (Schama, p. 149)

The lavish food on the table, along with all the other details, add to the drama of the moment. Feasts, Schama explains at length, were "deeply embedded in ancient Netherlandish usage," and the Dutch did not want to fear that they were indulging in a dangerous passtime such as that depicted. This dual commitment to both piety and luxury was an important characteristic of Dutch attitudes.

Embarrassment of Riches

Nicholas Maes painted a servant girl sleeping in a kitchen, neglecting her work. The painting seems to turn many things around from the usual way Dutch painters saw them. Very often, the kitchen is viewed through a door, off to the side, from a more important room in the house: here, the house shows through a door. The kitchen is foreground, not background, and the mistress of the house seems to be the one who is observing -- not as often happens, the servant. Neglect and duty were frequent themes of the paintings of the era, obviously front and center here.

In pursuit of a better understanding of the Dutch Golden Age, I have been reading The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age by Simon Schama. Chapter 3, "Feasting, Fasting, and Timely Atonement" could stand alone as a book on food and culture in this amazing era. I feel as though I learned a great deal about the meaning of food, kitchens, and people as they appear in the paintings of the era. Having read it makes me feel much more prepared to appreciate works such as the sleeping servant above.

Painter Nicholas Maes was especially known for his scenes from daily life. The painting below has a simpler theme: an attractive woman at work, peeling parsnips as a chubby-cheeked child looks on. "The preparation of food -- peeling of vegetables like Maes's parsnips -- could supply ... instruction in household virtue," Schama says (p. 559). A focus on children is the theme of another chapter of Schama's book -- the Dutch were very advanced in many aspects of their attitude toward children. Here, the kitchen activity is enhanced because of the child's participation in the scene.
One thematic pair that recurs in Dutch painting is the "Fat Kitchen" -- before Lent, but also representing wealth -- and the "Lean Kitchen" -- during Lent, also representing scarcity. Here are a pair of such paintings by Steen:

Some people were definitely richer than others in the Dutch Republic, but what's remarkable is that working people, doing even menial jobs, had a decent life and were far from starvation. The gap between rich and poor was large, but nothing like the gaps between grinding poverty and aristocracy in other European countries at the time.

The prayers of working people before they ate their simple meals were a frequent subject for artistic works (as I illustrated in my earlier post). Steen treated this theme several times:
Holiday feasts, as well as the feasts of guilds and associations, were an important element of life in the Dutch Republic, and they served a variety of social and cultural purposes. As depicted by portrait artists, these feasts also help us to envision how people enjoyed life. Steen's painting of the St.Nicholas feast is a good example:


The basket of treats in this detail from the picture especially helps to imagine how delicious the food must have been for people of many social levels in that era.