American Pandemic

In 1918-1919 influenza raged around the globe in the worst pandemic in recorded history. Focusing on those closest to the crisis-patients, families, communities, public health officials, nurses and doctors-this book explores the epidemic in the United States.

Nancy K. Bristow is Professor of History at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. She is the author of Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War. Bristow is the great-granddaughter of two of the pandemic's fatalities.

- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Lost Worlds
- Chapter One: "Influenza has apparently become domesticated with us": Influenza, Medicine and the Public, 1890-1918
- Chapter Two: "The whole world seems up-side-down": Patients, Families, and Communities Confront the Epidemic
- Chapter Three: "Let our experience be of value to other communities": Public Health Experts, the People, and Progressivism
- Chapter Four: "The experience was one I shall never forget": Doctors, Nurses, and the Challenges of the Epidemic
- Chapter Five: "The terrible and wonderful experience": Forgetting and Remembering in the Aftermath
- Epilogue: Reckoning the Costs of Amnesia
- Abbreviations
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index