When in doubt act sick

When in doubt act sick

For my Ap biology class we have to read a scientific novel on a biology subject. I am reading “The Great Influenza” by John M. Barry. It is about the Influenza epidemic that would hit the US during and after WWI. But this book doesn’t look at just the disease but who studied it and how the disease spread so quickly. 

The first part of the book, look at the development of how we trained or lack of training we required of our physicians. This lead to a lack of good health care in America; while in Europe they were starting to rethink and explore why the body got sick and how to prevent and fix it.

One of the major thing that I think they talked about is some doctors got their degree and never even touched or worked with either a cadaver or live patient till they started practicing.  My book emphasizes that this changed with the opening of John Hopkins medical school.

The main person to head this institution was William Henry Welch. Welch would become one of the most important people in this book. He would encourage other people to be great   and his idea of having a medical school with a laboratory to do nothing but research would help America change its ways of looking at medicine. Just in time for an epidemic that would be greater that any we had seen before or after.

 The influenza that would be the star of this epidemic would be Spanish influenza.  Spanish influenza didn’t start in Spain but Spain was the only country that kept a real record of how many of its people died from it.  One thing about Spanish Influenza that is important is it is a virus meaning that it can’t be treated very well with antibiotics. This meant that if a case broke out it might spread and physicians would have no way of combating it.

The Spanish influenza started in Fort Riley, United states. It started in an army camp because when we were mobilizing to join World War I, the army base camps were packed with new recruits who wanted to stop the German. This is how   the disease spread to other parts of the world with soldiers traveling to Europe to fight.

The camps where not ready for this; Meaning that overcrowding was in every camp. Also that winter was a cold one so men huddled around stoves to keep warm sharing there germs.  One thing that was bad was that at these camp the men who were there were from all over the country. So the immune systems where all over on know what kind of bacteria and virus it could fight.  That meant these means immune systems were up against now thing there body had seen.

I haven’t finished the book yet but it is very interesting so far have looked at not just doctors but military men and even Wilson who was president during the epidemic.