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Sandra Opdycke. The Flu Epidemic of 1918: America's Experience in the Global Health Crisis. Critical Moments in American History. New York: Routledge, 2014. xviii + 215 pp. Ill. $34.95 (978-0-415-63685-8).
Sandra Opdycke has provided a well-researched and clearly written synthesis of the American experience in the influenza epidemic of 1918-19, the worst pandemic in human history, which killed fifty to one hundred million people worldwide in less than two years. This volume in Routledge's Critical Moments in American History series embraces a generation of scholarly work on the flu and firsthand accounts of the epidemic from across the nation. Opdycke's reach is broad and deep as she contextualizes the 1918 influenza within the history of epidemics, the late nineteenth-century emergence of germ theory, and the status of health care in the early 1900s Progressive Era. Unlike many monographs on the flu, this one examines both the civilian and military experiences as well as local, state, and national governmental responses to the crisis. A full third of the book is devoted to the aftermath of the epidemic, exploring issues such as the lacuna...