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“Yet even that number understates the horror of the disease, a horror contained in other data. Normally influenza chiefly kills the elderly and infants, but in the 1918 pandemic roughly half of those who died were young men and women in the prime of their life, in their twenties and thirties. Harvey Cushing, then a brilliant young surgeon who would go on to great fame—and who himself fell desperately ill with influenza and never fully recovered from what was likely a complication—would call these victims “doubly dead in that they died so young.”
― John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

“So the advances of science actually, and ironically, led to “therapeutic nihilism.” Physicians became disenchanted with traditional treatments, but they had nothing with which to replace them.”
― John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

“The lowest estimate of the pandemic’s worldwide death toll is twenty-one million, in a world with a population less than one-third today’s. That estimate comes from a contemporary study of the disease and newspapers have often cited it since, but it is almost certainly wrong. Epidemiologists today estimate that influenza likely caused at least fifty million deaths worldwide, and possibly as many as one hundred million.”
― John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

“Huxley did not look the warrior. But he had a warrior’s ruthlessness. His dicta included the pronouncement: “The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying.”
― John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History