Showing results for "1918" in Health & Wellness

Early in September, 1918, the United States was invaded by a scourge of highly infectious and fatal disease, which spread with rapidity throughout the country, eventually infecting 500 million people worldwide, or about 27 percent of the world population, killing anywhere from 17 million to as many as 100 million, making it one of the deadliest epidemics in human history. Known as Spanish Influenza, it was pandemic in its nature. No one seemed to know much about the disease or its treatment, and medical science and public health agencies were alike unprepared to cope with it.

Between August 1918 and March 1919, the Spanish influenza spread worldwide, claiming over 25 million lives. In this vivid narrative, Alfred W. Crosby recounts the course of the pandemic during the panic-stricken months of 1918 and 1919, measures its impact on American society, and probes the curious loss of national memory of this cataclysmic event. This edition includes a preface discussing the then-recent outbreaks of diseases, including the Asian flu and the SARS epidemic.

Between the years 1918 and 1920, influenza raged around the globe in the worst pandemic in recorded history, killing at least 50 million people, more than half a million of them Americans. Yet despite the devastation, this catastrophic event seems but a forgotten moment in our nation's past. American Pandemic offers a much-needed corrective to the silence surrounding the influenza outbreak.

Dr. Sartor wrote an inspiring first-person account of how he treated more than 1,000 patients—and by his reckoning, lost only five—which lay forgotten in a lockbox of family artifacts until it was discovered decades later by his granddaughter, Beth Obermeyer, a journalist and author of three previous books. Beth knew her grandfather through her teenage years and grew up absorbing family stories. Based upon Dr. Sartor’s memoir and her years of research, she vividly reconstructs his life from childhood in Luxembourg to medical school in Chicago, courtship and marriage.

A piercing and scientifically grounded look at the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic and how it will change the way we live—"excellent and timely." (The New Yorker) Apollo's Arrow offers a riveting account of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic as it swept through American society in...