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Author: Carol R Byerly
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814799246
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
The influenza epidemic of 1918 killed more people in one year than the Great War killed in four, sickening at least one quarter of the world's population. In Fever of War, Carol R. Byerly uncovers the startling impact of the 1918 influenza epidemic on the American army, its medical officers, and their profession, a story which has long been silenced. Through medical officers' memoirs and diaries, official reports, scientific articles, and other original sources, Byerly tells a grave tale about the limits of modern medicine and warfare. The tragedy begins with overly confident medical officers who, armed with new knowledge and technologies of modern medicine, had an inflated sense of their ability to control disease. The conditions of trench warfare on the Western Front soon outflanked medical knowledge by creating an environment where the influenza virus could mutate to a lethal strain. This new flu virus soon left medical officers’ confidence in tatters as thousands of soldiers and trainees died under their care. They also were unable to convince the War Department to reduce the crowding of troops aboard ships and in barracks which were providing ideal environments for the epidemic to thrive. After the war, and given their helplessness to control influenza, many medical officers and military leaders began to downplay the epidemic as a significant event for the U. S. army, in effect erasing this dramatic story from the American historical memory.
Author: Carol R Byerly
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814799246
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274
Get Book Here
Book Description
The influenza epidemic of 1918 killed more people in one year than the Great War killed in four, sickening at least one quarter of the world's population. In Fever of War, Carol R. Byerly uncovers the startling impact of the 1918 influenza epidemic on the American army, its medical officers, and their profession, a story which has long been silenced. Through medical officers' memoirs and diaries, official reports, scientific articles, and other original sources, Byerly tells a grave tale about the limits of modern medicine and warfare. The tragedy begins with overly confident medical officers who, armed with new knowledge and technologies of modern medicine, had an inflated sense of their ability to control disease. The conditions of trench warfare on the Western Front soon outflanked medical knowledge by creating an environment where the influenza virus could mutate to a lethal strain. This new flu virus soon left medical officers’ confidence in tatters as thousands of soldiers and trainees died under their care. They also were unable to convince the War Department to reduce the crowding of troops aboard ships and in barracks which were providing ideal environments for the epidemic to thrive. After the war, and given their helplessness to control influenza, many medical officers and military leaders began to downplay the epidemic as a significant event for the U. S. army, in effect erasing this dramatic story from the American historical memory.
Author: Matthew Smallman-Raynor
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780191513459
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 842
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Book Description
Down the ages, war epidemics have decimated the fighting strength of armies, caused the suspension and cancellation of military operations, and have brought havoc to the civil populations of belligerent and non-belligerent states alike. This book examines the historical occurrence and geographical spread of infectious diseases in association with past wars. It addresses an intrinsically geographical question: how are the spatial dynamics of epidemics influenced by military operations and the directives of war? The term historical geography in the title indicates the authors' primary concern with qualitative analyses of archival source materials over a 150-year time period from 1850, and this is combined with quantitative analyses less frequently associated with historical studies. Written from the viewpoints of historical geography, epidemiology, and spatial analysis, this book examines in four parts the historical occurrence and geographical spread of infectious diseases in association with wars. Part I: War and Disease, surveys war-disease associations from early times to 1850. Part II: Temporal Trends studies time trends since 1850. Part III: A Regional Pattern of War Epidemics, examines grand themes in the war-disease complex. Part IV: Prospects, considers a series of war-related issues of epidemiological significance in the twenty-first century.
Author: Jack E. McCallum
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 1682478106
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
In Epidemics and the American Military, Dr. Jack McCallum examines the major role the military has played propagating and controlling disease throughout this nation’s history. The U.S. armed forces recruit young people from isolated rural areas and densely populated cities, many of whom have been exposed to a smorgasbord of germs. After training and living in close contact with each other for months, soldiers are shipped across countries and continents and meet civilians and other armies. McCallum argues that if one set out to design a perfect world for an aggressive pathogen, it would be hard to do better than an army at war. There are four ways to combat epidemic infectious diseases: quarantine, altering the ecology in which infections spread, medical treatment of infection, and immunization. Each has played a specific but often overlooked role in American wars. A case can be made that General George Washington saved the American Revolution when he mandated inoculation of the Continental Army with smallpox. The Union Army might very well have taken Richmond in 1862 had it not been for an epidemic of typhoid fever during the Peninsular Campaign. Yellow fever was a proximate cause of the American invasion of Cuba in 1898, and its control enabled a continued U.S. presence on the island and in the rest of the Caribbean. Had it not been for influenza, German Gen. Erich Ludendorff might well have succeeded in his offensive in the closing years of World War I. Before senior Army and Naval officers recognized the importance of anti-malarial prophylaxis and forced its acceptance by hesitant troops, the World War II Solomon and New Guinea campaigns were in danger of collapsing.
Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309095042
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 431
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Book Description
Public health officials and organizations around the world remain on high alert because of increasing concerns about the prospect of an influenza pandemic, which many experts believe to be inevitable. Moreover, recent problems with the availability and strain-specificity of vaccine for annual flu epidemics in some countries and the rise of pandemic strains of avian flu in disparate geographic regions have alarmed experts about the world's ability to prevent or contain a human pandemic. The workshop summary, The Threat of Pandemic Influenza: Are We Ready? addresses these urgent concerns. The report describes what steps the United States and other countries have taken thus far to prepare for the next outbreak of "killer flu." It also looks at gaps in readiness, including hospitals' inability to absorb a surge of patients and many nations' incapacity to monitor and detect flu outbreaks. The report points to the need for international agreements to share flu vaccine and antiviral stockpiles to ensure that the 88 percent of nations that cannot manufacture or stockpile these products have access to them. It chronicles the toll of the H5N1 strain of avian flu currently circulating among poultry in many parts of Asia, which now accounts for the culling of millions of birds and the death of at least 50 persons. And it compares the costs of preparations with the costs of illness and death that could arise during an outbreak.
Author: Gina Kolata
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429979356
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 378
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Book Description
Veteran journalist Gina Kolata's Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It presents a fascinating look at true story of the world's deadliest disease. In 1918, the Great Flu Epidemic felled the young and healthy virtually overnight. An estimated forty million people died as the epidemic raged. Children were left orphaned and families were devastated. As many American soldiers were killed by the 1918 flu as were killed in battle during World War I. And no area of the globe was safe. Eskimos living in remote outposts in the frozen tundra were sickened and killed by the flu in such numbers that entire villages were wiped out. Scientists have recently rediscovered shards of the flu virus frozen in Alaska and preserved in scraps of tissue in a government warehouse. Gina Kolata, an acclaimed reporter for The New York Times, unravels the mystery of this lethal virus with the high drama of a great adventure story. Delving into the history of the flu and previous epidemics, detailing the science and the latest understanding of this mortal disease, Kolata addresses the prospects for a great epidemic recurring, and, most important, what can be done to prevent it.
Author: W. Michael Scheld
Publisher: ASM Press
ISBN: 9781555811211
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
Technical discussions of various infectious diseases.
Author: Elizabeth A. Fenn
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780809078219
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
A horrifying epidemic of smallpox was sweeping across the Americas when the War of Independence began, and yet little is known about it. Fenn reveals how deeply "variola" affected the outcome of the war in every colony and the lives of everyone in North America. Illustrations.
Author: Alfred W. Crosby
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107394015
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
Between August 1918 and March 1919 the Spanish influenza spread worldwide, claiming over 25 million lives - more people than perished in the fighting of the First World War. It proved fatal to at least a half-million Americans. Yet, the Spanish flu pandemic is largely forgotten today. 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 2003 edition includes a preface discussing the then recent outbreaks of diseases, including the Asian flu and the SARS epidemic.
Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309170397
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
Perspectives on the Department of Defense Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System: A Program Review describes the capacity, quality, and effectiveness of the international and domestic facilities and programs that are a part of a DoD system to monitor and address emerging infectious diseases globally. The committee concludes that the goals of the system are in U.S. military, U.S. civilian, and global public health interests and that substantial progress has been made toward achieving system goals.
Author: John Fabian Witt
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300257775
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185
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Book Description
A concise history of how American law has shaped—and been shaped by—the experience of contagion“Contrarians and the civic-minded alike will find Witt’s legal survey a fascinating resource”—Kirkus, starred review “Professor Witt’s book is an original and thoughtful contribution to the interdisciplinary study of disease and American law. Although he covers the broad sweep of the American experience of epidemics from yellow fever to COVID-19, he is especially timely in his exploration of the legal background to the current disaster of the American response to the coronavirus. A thought-provoking, readable, and important work.”—Frank Snowden, author of Epidemics and Society From yellow fever to smallpox to polio to AIDS to COVID-19, epidemics have prompted Americans to make choices and answer questions about their basic values and their laws. In five concise chapters, historian John Fabian Witt traces the legal history of epidemics, showing how infectious disease has both shaped, and been shaped by, the law. Arguing that throughout American history legal approaches to public health have been liberal for some communities and authoritarian for others, Witt shows us how history’s answers to the major questions brought up by previous epidemics help shape our answers today: What is the relationship between individual liberty and the common good? What is the role of the federal government, and what is the role of the states? Will long-standing traditions of government and law give way to the social imperatives of an epidemic? Will we let the inequities of our mixed tradition continue?
