When Sickness Strikes

In 1918, a young man joined the armed forces and set off for France. But he never made it. Along with most of his platoon, the boy died of influenza on the way over and was buried at sea. His parents—my mother's neighbors when she was growing up—didn't learn of their son's fate until weeks later.

The young soldier was not alone. According to David Getz's Purple Death: The Mysterious Flu of 1918 (Holt, 2000), influenza killed 85 percent of the American soldiers who fought in World War I. There were not enough doctors or nurses to treat the sick, nor enough coffins to contain the bodies. This terrifying episode is known as a pandemic, a sudden outbreak of disease that afflicts thousands of people in a wide geographic area within a short period. Scientists estimate that the 1918 flu pandemic killed 20 to 40 million people worldwide. But the origins of the disease remain a mystery.

James Cross Giblin's When Plague Strikes: The Black Death, Smallpox, AIDS (HarperCollins, 1995) describes the world's most widespread pandemic, an occurrence of bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death. According to legend, some unlucky Italian traders who sailed the Black Sea in the 1300s spread the disease. The traders were generally at odds with the locals. At one point, the Italians were holed up in a fortress, but angry natives catapulted corpses, riddled with plague, over the barricaded walls, and when the merchants returned to their own country, they carried the disease with them.

Ask your booktalk listeners if they have ever gone to a doctor for shots. Do they know what the shots were for? Smallpox will surely be a name familiar to your audience. And it's the subject of Albert Marrin's fascinating book Dr. Jenner and the Speckled Monster: The Search for the Smallpox Vaccine (Dutton, 2002). Scientists believe that smallpox has been around for 8,000 years. We know that Egypt's pharaoh Ramses V, who died in 1157 B.C., suffered from smallpox—his mummy still bears the telltale pockmarks.

The disease devastated its victims. One out of every three people who caught it died, and one out of six went blind. But careful observers noted that anyone who survived smallpox did not get it again. More than 1,000 years ago, an experimenter in China crushed smallpox scabs, then blew the resulting powder up the noses of healthy people, who then developed smallpox, but only a light case, and were thereafter immune to the disease. By the 1600s, this practice had spread across Asia. A variation on the procedure was to extract pus from a smallpox sufferer and rub the infected fluid into a scratch dug into a healthy person's arm.

Jim Murphy's An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 (Clarion, 2003) takes place in Philadelphia, then the nation's capital. Open sewers were common. Rotting garbage filled the streets. No one knew much about sanitation or bacteria. The city that year was a disaster waiting to happen.

Many citizens were becoming ill. Their skin turned yellowish and they vomited black, horrible-smelling stuff. Most of them were dying. The epidemic shut down the government. Even President George Washington was forced to flee the disease-ridden capital. The remaining inhabitants were mostly poor people and a few brave, caring individuals, including an incredible group of African Americans who tried heroically to aid the victims. How the city endured the pandemic and how science discovered the cure for yellow fever are only a part of Murphy's amazing story.