Home / Books / Pandemic 1918

Catharine Arnold

Pandemic 1918

The Story of the Deadliest Influenza in History

Price: £10.99

Select a format:

Select a retailer:

Details

Imprint: O'Mara Books

Publication date: 21/05/2020

ISBN: 9781789292930

Subject: Non-Fiction

Category: Science - History - Philosophy

Binding: Paperback

Size: 198 x 129 mm

Extent: 368 pages

Illustration: 16pp coolour plates

Territorial Rights: UK and Commonwealth

Edition Status: Out of Print

Trade

Effortlessly manage bulk orders with us, simply enquire for pricing and detailed information. Our team is ready to ensure a smooth process for you.

Enquire now

Summary:

In the dying months of the First World War, Spanish Flu suddenly overwhelmed the globe, killing up to 100 million people. it was one of the most devastating natural disasters in world history ...
___________

‘Offers us a coherent, well-researched and sanitary reminder that another pandemic could be just around the corner with equally horrific consequences.’ – Sir Tony Robinson
‘Fascinating … lurid and pacy … the page-turning fascination of a detective thriller.’ – BBC History Magazine
‘A remarkable job … arresting and intimate narrative.’ – New Statesman
___________

But behind the staggering figures are human lives, stories of those who suffered and those who fought back – at the Front, at home, in the hospitals and laboratories. Digging into archives, unpublished records, memoirs, diaries and government documents, Catharine Arnold traces the course of the disease through the accounts of those who experienced it – from those in high office to the ordinary people: the troops, nurses, miners, labourers, and many others who were left with no memorial.

100 years after the disease burned its way across the globe, this stingingly prescient book examines the lessons that devastating outbreak taught us – and those we perhaps did not learn in time, as Covid-19 wreaks havoc across the world in 2020.

Reviews:

Catharine Arnold’s book offers us a coherent, well-researched and sanitary reminder that another pandemic could be just around the corner with equally horrific consequences.

Sir Tony Robinson

Fascinating … lurid and pacy … the page-turning fascination of a detective thriller.

BBC History Magazine

Catharine Arnold has done a remarkable job of relating the tales of a diverse set of sufferers, crafting an arresting and intimate narrative of the 1918 pandemic … a gripping tale that swoops down into the grisly detail, then soars up to give a broad view over the landscape of this calamitous moment in human history … Arnold writes beautifully, and starkly, of the tragedy that unfolded.

New Statesman

Sales points:

  • A moving and thought-provoking history of the deadliest human disaster in recorded history

  • Features new evidence and many previously unpublished documents from a wide array of sources, including patients and their families, diaries, medics, scientists, government documents and newspapers

  • Paints a vivid picture of the human impact this cataclysmic event had on tens of millions of people all over the world

  • Catharine Arnold is the author of the highly acclaimed London quartet, a series about the dark side of the capital, consisting of Necropolis: London and its Dead, Bedlam: London and its Mad, City of Sin: London and its Vices and Underworld: London City of Crime and Punishment

About the Author:

Catharine Arnold

Catharine Arnold is the author of the much-acclaimed London quartet, a series about the dark side of the capital, consisting of Necropolis, London and its Dead, Bedlam, London and its Mad, City of Sin, London and its Vices and Underworld, London City of Crime and Punishment. Her first novel, Lost Time, won a Betty Trask Award. Catharine read English at the University of Cambridge and holds a further degree in psychology. She is a popular TV presenter and speaker.