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“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

“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