Laura Spinney > Quotes

“What the Spanish flu taught us, in essence, is that another flu pandemic is inevitable, but whether it kills 10 million or 100 million will be determined by the world into which it emerges.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“Your best chance of survival was to be utterly selfish.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“One 2007 study showed that public health measures such as banning mass gatherings and imposing the wearing of masks collectively cut the death toll in some American cities by up to 50 per cent (the US was much better at imposing such measures than Europe). The timing of the measures was critical, however. They had to be introduced early, and kept in place until after the danger had passed. If they were lifted too soon, the virus was presented with a fresh supply of immunologically naive hosts, and the city experienced a second peak of death.9”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World

“The Spanish flu is remembered personally, not collectively. Not as a historical disaster, but as millions of discrete, private tragedies.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“Assuming that you had a place you could call home, the optimal strategy was to stay there (but not immure yourself), not answer the door (especially to doctors), jealously guard your hoard of food and water, and ignore all pleas for help. Not only would this improve your own chances of staying alive, but if everyone did it, the density of susceptible individuals would soon fall below the threshold required to sustain the epidemic, and it would extinguish itself.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“Cordon sanitaire. Isolation. Quarantine. These are age-old concepts that human beings have been putting into practice since long before they understood the nature of the agents of contagion, long before they even considered epidemics to be acts of God. In fact, we may have had strategies for distancing ourselves from sources of infection since before we were strictly human.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“One 2007 study showed that public health measures such as banning mass gatherings and imposing the wearing of masks collectively cut the death toll in some American cities by up to 50 per cent (the US was much better at imposing such measures than Europe). The timing of the measures was critical, however. They had to be introduced early, and kept in place until after the danger had passed. If they were lifted too soon, the virus was presented with a fresh supply of immunologically naive hosts, and the city experienced a second peak of death.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“It is often said that the First World War killed Romanticism and faith in progress, but if science facilitated industrial-scale slaughter in the form of the war, it also failed to prevent it in the form of the Spanish flu. The flu resculpted human populations more radically than anything since the Black Death. It influenced the course of the First World War and, arguably, contributed to the Second. It pushed India closer to independence, South Africa closer to apartheid, and Switzerland to the brink of civil war. It ushered in universal healthcare and alternative medicine, our love of fresh air and our passion for sport, and it was probably responsible, at least in part, for the obsession of twentieth-century artists with all the myriad ways in which the human body can fail. ‘Arguably”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“that density–collectively called ‘social distancing’–can both bring it to an end sooner, and reduce the number of casualties.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“he took three potentially life-saving decisions. First, he eliminated rush hour by staggering the opening times of factories, shops and cinemas. Second, he established a clearing-house system under which 150 emergency health centres were set up across the city to coordinate the care and reporting of the sick. And third and most controversially, he kept the schools open.12”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“Between the first case recorded on 4 March 1918, and the last sometime in March 1920, it killed 50–100 million people, or between 2.5 and 5 per cent of the global population–a range that reflects the uncertainty that still surrounds it.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“It was the greatest tidal wave of death since the Black Death, perhaps in the whole of human history.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“For flu to spread, therefore, people must live fairly close together.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“Most of the death occurred in the thirteen weeks between mid-September and mid-December 1918. It was broad in space and shallow in time, compared to a narrow, deep war.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World

“To try to prevent some of these problems, in 2015 the World Health Organization issued guidelines stipulating that disease names should not make reference to specific places, people, animals or food.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“Schools, theatres and places of worship were closed, the use of public transport systems was restricted and mass gatherings were banned.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“The new collectives that farming supported gave rise to new diseases–the so-called ‘crowd diseases’ such as measles, smallpox, tuberculosis and influenza. Humans had always been susceptible to infectious disease–leprosy and malaria were causing misery long before the farming revolution–but these were adapted to surviving in small, dispersed human populations. Among their tricks for doing so were not conferring total immunity on a recovered host, so that he or she could be infected again, and retreating to another host–a so-called ‘animal reservoir’–when humans were scarce. Both strategies helped ensure that they maintained a sufficiently large pool of susceptible hosts.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“In August the flu returned transformed. This was the second and most lethal wave of the pandemic, and again by”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“When asked what was the biggest disaster of the twentieth century, almost nobody answers the Spanish flu.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“It was a fascinating hint that flu might have a heritable component, but other studies failed to replicate the finding. Then in January 2011, in the midst of the annual flu season in France, a two-year-old girl was admitted to the intensive care unit of the Necker Hospital for Sick Children in Paris, suffering from ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome). Doctors saved her life, and one of them, Jean-Laurent Casanova, sequenced her genome. He wanted to know if it held the key to why an otherwise healthy child had nearly died of a disease that most children shrug off. It turned out that the girl had inherited a genetic defect that meant she was unable to produce interferon, that all-important first-line defence against viruses. As a result, her besieged immune system went straight to plan B: a massive inflammatory response similar to the one pathologists saw in 1918.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“What Casanova’s finding meant was that, regardless of their culture, diet, social status or income, one in 10,000 people are particularly vulnerable to flu–a vulnerability that they inherit from their parents.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“Linguists consider that on average it takes between five hundred and a thousand years for a language to become incomprehensible to its original speakers”
― Laura Spinney, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global

“The Swiss-born architect known as Le Corbusier retreated to his rooms in Paris and sipped cognac and smoked through the worst of the pandemic, while cogitating on how to revolutionise the way people lived (though he hadn’t even a diploma in architecture).”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“a language is a dialect with an army and a navy,”
― Laura Spinney, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global

“The bubonic form is characterised by telltale ‘buboes’, when lymph nodes swell painfully; the septicaemic form arises from an infection of the”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“If you were to represent the three hundred millennia of Homo sapiens’ existence as a twenty-four-hour clock, writing emerged at about thirty minutes to midnight. It was at that moment that history began (history, from Greek historia meaning ‘knowledge’ or ‘inquiry’, and later ‘chronicle’ or ‘account’). Everything before that we call prehistory.”
― Laura Spinney, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global

“Modern English-speakers can understand the Middle English of Shakespeare, who wrote in the sixteenth century, but not the Old English of Beowulf, which was composed nine hundred years earlier.”
― Laura Spinney, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global

“The phenomenon that scholars are attempting to understand is ephemeral: the emanations of long-vanished brains that caused long-vanished eardrums to vibrate. They are acutely aware that the rules that guide them are, with the exception of the sound laws, rules of thumb and no more. If migration has driven language change, it hasn’t been the whole story. The Scythians rode into Ukraine and India but left their language in neither.‡ The Romans got as far as Britain, but Latin stayed (mostly) in France. Whoever carried Celtic to Ireland caused barely a tremor in the Irish gene pool.”
― Laura Spinney, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global

“Now, eight billion humans speak around seven thousand languages. Those languages fall into about a hundred and forty families, but most of us speak languages that belong to just five of them: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic and Austronesian. Among those five, two behemoths stand out: Indo-European, whose major representative is English, and Sino-Tibetan, which includes Mandarin Chinese.”
― Laura Spinney, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global

“strategies have to be imposed in a top-down fashion. But”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World