No disease the world has ever known even remotely resembles the great influenza epidemic of 1918. Presumed to have begun when sick farm animals infected soldiers in Kansas, spreading and mutating into a lethal strain as troops carried it to Europe, it exploded across the world with unequaled ferocity and speed. It killed more people in twenty weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty years; it killed more people in a year than the plagues of the Middle Ages killed in a century. Victims bled from the ears and nose, turned blue from lack of oxygen, suffered aches that felt like bones being broken, and died. In the United States, where bodies were stacked without coffins on trucks, nearly seven times as many people died of influenza as in the First World War.

In his powerful new book, award-winning historian John M. Barry unfolds a tale that is magisterial in its breadth and in the depth of its research, and spellbinding as he weaves multiple narrative strands together. In this first great collision between science and epidemic disease, even as society approached collapse, a handful of heroic researchers stepped forward, risking their lives to confront this strange disease. Titans like William Welch at the newly formed Johns Hopkins Medical School and colleagues at Rockefeller University and others from around the country revolutionized American science and public health, and their work in this crisis led to crucial discoveries that we are still using and learning from today.

The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley said Barry’s last book can "change the way we think." The Great Influenza may also change the way we see the world.

作者：John M. Barry为《纽约时报》《时代周刊》《华盛顿邮报》的撰稿人，著作多次登上《纽约时报》畅销书排行榜。其著作《细胞变异》被译成12种语言出版，《潮起——1927年密西西比河洪水及其对美国的影响》获“史密斯奖”、“南方图书奖”等众多奖项。《大流感》被美国科学院评为2005年度最佳科学/医学类图书。

译者：

钟扬，复旦大学生命科学学院教授,植物学和生物信息学博士生导师。现为复旦大学生命科学学院常务副院长，生物多样性与生态工程教育部重点实验室副主任，上海生物信息技术研究中心副主任；兼任北京大学理论生物学中心教授、西藏大学教授等。

金力，现任复旦大学副校长，生物医学研究院基因组学研究所所长，中科院-马普学会计算生物学伙伴研究所所长，国家人类基因组南方研究中心副主任，美洲华人遗传学会会长,　教育部现代人类学重点实验室主任， 摩尔根-谈家桢国际生命科学研究中心副主任等职务。现为《人类基因组学》(英国)主编、《人类生物学》（美国）、《突变研究》（美国）、《中华医学遗传学杂志》（中国）、《中国生物学前沿》（中国）、《人类学杂志》（克罗地亚）等杂志的编委。