Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Great Influenza, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Leadership and Crisis
Truth, Free Press, and Propaganda
Science vs. Nature
Education, Research, and Institutions
Summary
Analysis
As soon as Welch saw autopsies of victims at Camp Devens, he called a Harvard pathologist, Gorgas, and Avery at the Rockefeller Institute. Avery immediately went back to his lab and got to work. On September 27, 1918, Welch, Cole, and Vaughan wired the surgeon general at Devens that Pfeiffer’s bacillus was the cause of the pandemic. But Avery remained skeptical and continued to work.
While day-to-day work in laboratories during the pandemic could be isolated, this isolation was balanced out by exchanges with other scientists at other labs. Again, Welch showed good judgment by recognizing that what was happening at Camp Devens was bigger than anything that he himself could investigate—it would require a whole scientific community.
Themes
From the start of his career, Avery liked to exert control over his labs, although young scientists who worked with him still said he was an agreeable colleague. Avery disliked working in a pandemic not because of the pressure but because of the chaos it introduced into his orderly systems.
Avery represents a different style of leadership from Lewis, although he shared many of the same positive qualities. Like Lewis, Avery found a way to balance the ideals of the scientific method with the reality of the unfolding crisis.
Themes
Avery set up an experiment in order to test whether Pfeiffer’s B. influenzae was actually showing up in victims of influenza or whether other labs had a confirmation bias because they expected to find it. He proved that in certain conditions, it was possible to grow B. influenzae and create false positives. Avery recommended doing everything possible to rapidly push the anti-pneumococcus vaccine but not the anti-influenzal (B. influenzae) vaccine. Creating it at a large enough scale, however, would be a challenge.
Barry jumps between the research of Pfeiffer, Park and Williams, Lewis, and now Avery to show how research progressed incrementally and on multiple fronts at once. Avery’s research into false positives was particularly useful because it revealed a potential flaw in the work of many of his peers. Often, researching the correct solution involves finding ways to eliminate wrong solutions.
Themes
