Pale Rider 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Hippocrates argued that the causes of disease were physical, and that they could be divined by observing a patient’s symptoms.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“Hippocrates argued that the causes of disease were physical, and that they could be divined by observing a patient’s symptoms. He and his disciples introduced a system for classifying diseases, which is why he is often referred to as the father of western medicine: he was responsible for the notions of diagnosis and treatment that still underpin medicine today (he also left us with a code of medical ethics, the Hippocratic Oath, from which we have the promise made by newly qualified doctors to ‘do no harm’).”
― 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

“Memory is an active process. Details have to be rehearsed to be retained,”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“Upon the death from flu of one German immigrant to America, for example, his widow and son received a sum of money. They invested it in property, and today the immigrant’s grandson is a property magnate purportedly worth billions. His name is Donald Trump.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“cities now became breeding grounds for crowd diseases, such that urban populations were unable to sustain themselves–they needed a constant influx of healthy peasants from the countryside to make up for the lives lost to infection.”
― 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

“Your best chance of survival was to be utterly selfish. 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

“The tubercular Franz Kafka caught it in Prague on 14 October and, confined to his sickbed, witnessed the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from his window.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“It makes them vulnerable to infection, and then it sets large numbers of them in motion so that they can carry that infection to new places.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“Wars, too, brought epidemics in their wake. Conflict makes people hungry and anxious; it uproots them, packs them into insanitary camps and requisitions their doctors.”
― Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

“Against other things it is possible to obtain security,’ wrote the Greek philosopher Epicurus in the third century BC, ‘but when it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city.”
― 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

“Whereas a benign, seasonal virus produced a transient cytokine response and localised, superficial damage to the lung, the 1918 variety produced a strong, prolonged cytokine response and damage that was severe and deep.”
― 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

“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