| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Howard Phillips and David Killingray, editors. The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19: New Perspectives. (Routledge Studies in the Social History of Medicine, number 12.) New York: Routledge. 2003. Pp. xxi, 357. $90.00.
Most volumes of conference papers make me glad I did not attend. This one is exceptional. Editors Howard Phillips and David Killingray describe the meeting in Cape Town in September 1998 in glowing terms, and the papers they have selected for publication are of such quality that I am sorry nobody invited me. The editors' introduction is a model, thoughtful and bibliographically rich. The fifty-page, country-by-country bibliography at the end of the book is an invitation for others to take up the challenges that this volume throws down and investigate the most devastating epidemic of the twentieth century in more detail. The bibliography's richness slightly belies the volume's repeated theme that influenza has been neglected by historians.	1
The central puzzle that the editors raise, and that several of the contributors take up, is why this influenza pandemic has been so historically silent. It killed more people than World War I. It stretched postwar medical services, already depleted by four years of total war, to the breaking point. It also challenged the confidence that doctors, and their public, had developed in the power of scientific medicine to control infectious diseases. By 1918, germ theory was half a century old, and the causative organisms of many of the major killers—tuberculosis, cholera, plague, malaria, typhoid, pneumonia, and puerperal fever—had been identified, and strategies for their prevention and treatment elaborated, on scientific grounds. Nevertheless, the great influenza pandemic left little behind except the dead: no permanent legacies in terms of medical research or the organization of health care.	. . .

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