The Plague of the Spanish Lady - The Influenza Pandemic - October 1918 to January 1919

Macmillan, 1974. Black hard cover with gilt titles on spine. Boards are bright and clean. Contents tight with no inscriptions or markings. Pages are heaviy age-toned. 376pp. Dust jacket has minor edge-wear and has been price clipped. Good copy with darkened pages and nice DW.

Little has been written to describe comprehensively the pandemic of influenza that slaughtered more than 21 million people between October 1918 and January 1919. Comparable in its ferocity only with the Black Deth of the Middle Ages, the disease struck world-wide within a three month period, with such devastation that fit men could drop dead in the street without warning and the medical world came seriously to fear the end of civilisation. Here Richard Collier sets out to present the pandemic in terms of human experience, based on the memories of more than 1700 world survivors. For the first time we have not a medical textbook or the creation of a novelist, but the diverse reactions of ordinary citizens as the disease grew in intensity...