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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

“Yet the story of the 1918 influenza virus is not simply one of havoc, death, and desolation, of a society fighting a war against nature superimposed on a war against another human society. It is also a story of science, of discovery, of how one thinks, and of how one changes the way one thinks, of how amidst near-utter chaos a few men sought the coolness of contemplation, the utter calm that precedes not philosophizing but grim, determined action.”
― 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

“In the United States, the story is particularly one of a handful of extraordinary people, of whom Paul Lewis is one.”
― John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History