Unsolved! Are a 2016)

The St Louis Red Cross Motor Corps on duty in Missouri during the influenza epidemic that affected one-third of the world’s population.

INFLUENZA A viral world war Tilli Tansey commends a chronicle tracing the pathways of the 1918 flu pandemic.

he 1918 influenza pandemic prob- The pandemic that all three may be linked — an ill Chinese ably infected one-third of the world’s reached around the worker, travelling across North America population at the time — 500 million globe, but Africa and in the British-run Chinese Labour Corps, Tpeople. It killed between 50 million and Asia suffered dispro- infects an army recruit from Kansas on the 100 million; by contrast, Second World War portionately, with more eve of shipping to the battlefields of France. deaths numbered around 60 million. Why Kenyans dying than One thing that is certain is that the epithet is this catastrophe not better remembered? Scots, more Indone- ‘Spanish flu’ is practically libellous. Censor- Science journalist Laura Spinney reflects sians than Netherland- ship in warring nations meant that news of ARCHIVES/GETTY UNDERWOOD on this conundrum and the nature of histori- ers. Spinney’s extensive outbreaks in Flanders in early 1918 were cal memory in her impressive Pale Rider. She Pale Rider: The research has unearthed suppressed. French physicians referred to concludes that the pandemic is largely known Spanish Flu of detailed case studies it as ‘Disease Eleven’. The first widely publi- as small, personal tragedies, not as a collective 1918 and How from Europe’s battle- cized reports were from neutral Spain in June record. Eschewing a linear narrative, she has it Changed the fields, the gold mines 1918, especially those of King Alfonso XIII’s World modelled her account loosely on Talmudic LAURA SPINNEY of South Africa, indig- illness. With no reported antecedents, the scholarship, in which layers of commentary Jonathan Cape: 2017. enous communities in flu acquired its inaccurate eponym. And the are added to a text in expanding circles. The Alaska and Shanxi in time-honoured custom of blaming ‘the other’ pandemic is central, but intersecting stories rural China, the shrine city of Mashhad in spread: in Senegal, the illness was Brazilian radiate out — reflections on medical prac- Persia, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. The world flu; Brazil blamed it on the Germans; Poland, tice, scientific research, town planning, reli- became a vast incubator of disease, and the on the Bolsheviks; and Persia, on the British. gious beliefs, political systems, and ideas and virus spread in waves, the most deadly begin- Set against the devastating backdrop of practices on disease containment, right up to ning in mid-1918. Did it jump from a bird or a global contagion, it is individual lives and today’s catastrophe modelling amid concerns pig to a human in a crowded rural community deaths, discovered in letters, diaries, biogra- about AIDS, Zika and Ebola. in China? Did chemicals used on the Western phies and memoirs, that epitomize this rich One of Spinney’s messages is that the front, such as mustard gas, trigger a mutation account. Spinney invokes potent images. pandemic signified failure — on the part of in the virus, which then ran rampant through We encounter doctors trying “like so many medicine, science, civil and military authori- weakened troops? Bordeaux wine merchants” to define the ties, governments and society. Collectively, Spinney’s forensic search for ‘patient zero’ subtle changes of a patient’s complexion, from they neither did nor could control or contain posits three possibilities: a soldier admitted healthy pink to morbid blue; and a dying dove the scourge. It is said that the winner writes to a military hospital in France, a peasant fluttering into the hands of the playwright history, but this disaster had no ‘winner’ in labourer in Shanxi or a dirt-poor farmer in Edmond Rostand, who succumbed three whose interest a history could be perpetuated. Kansas. Tantalizingly, she even speculates weeks later. We discover strange folk rituals

COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS to ward off epidemics, such as a ‘black wedding’ in a Jewish graveyard in Odessa. And we’re reminded that there is scarcely a cemetery anywhere from the time without a cluster of victims’ tombstones. The pandemic burnt out in 1920, but

its impact persisted in communities and VIA GETTY LEEMAGE/CORBIS nations doubly devastated by war and pestilence. Many governments, shaken by their failure to control it, recognized that infectious disease was not the sole respon- sibility of the individual. By the mid-1920s, most European countries had established health-care programmes. Germany and Britain expanded their rudimentary pre- war systems. The newly created Soviet Union set up a centralized organization for urban communities, emphasizing public health. US health surveys and morbidity reporting were coordinated by 1925; a National Quarantine Service was established in China in 1930. Laboratory expertise in epidemiology, virology and pharmacology burgeoned. The Rockefel- The Phaistos disc, discovered in Crete in 1908, remains untranslated. ler Foundation in New York City became an important player in international public CRYPTOGRAPHY health, and the Pasteur Institute in Paris established its first overseas branch, in Tehran, to study infectious disease. Now, with new epidemics exacerbated The codes that got away by rapid and constant international movement of people, animals and virulent Andrew Robinson takes on a compendium of past and organisms, governments are braced for a current ciphers ripe for decoding. future flu pandemic. The questions ‘when’ and ‘how big’ dominate; bodies such as the World Health Organization and the US he concluding words of Unsolved! are a 2016). Bauer specu- Centers for Disease Control and Preven- call to action. Craig Bauer, a US math- lates as to whether tion monitor climate change and disease ematician and editor-in-chief of the the manuscript is outbreaks, assess evolving viral strains for Tjournal Cryptologia, ends his hefty history of written in a mono- potential vaccines and prepare emergency cryptography by noting that even as he was alphabetic substitu- lab networks and surveillance systems. compiling the book, “unsolved ciphers from tion cipher (MASC) Epidemiological models estimate death decades, sometimes centuries, in the past — each plaintext let- tolls of 20 million to 100 million — still were coming to light on a regular basis”, along ter substituted with terrifying, albeit a lower proportion of the with a plethora of new puzzles. For cryptog- a letter from a single global population than in 1918. Quaran- raphy fiends, it’s a thrown gauntlet. Unsolved! The scrambled alphabet. tine, prohibition of large gatherings, and Unsolved! spans a huge arc of time and History and A crackable MASCed mass vaccination will play their part — all space, from Julius Caesar’s simple substitu- Mystery of the text in English reveals lessons learnt a century ago. tion cipher to composer Edward Elgar’s 1897 World’s Greatest the principles. But, as Along with exemplary research, Dorabella Cipher — a still-unsolved letter to Ciphers from he shows, the Voynich Ancient Egypt Spinney’s narrative is packed with fasci- Dora Penny, a dedicatee of his Enigma Varia- to Online Secret manuscript has too nating, quirky detail — such as the royal tions. Uncracked ciphers from the twentieth Societies much redundancy rebranding of the Real Madrid football century are associated with the Irish Repub- CRAIG BAUER (order) to be MASCed team as part of a post-flu ‘sports for health’ lican Army, a series of grisly murders in Cali- Princeton University English, French, Ger- movement. US President Donald Trump fornia — and messages ‘detected’ from Mars. Press: 2017. man, Italian, Spanish even makes an appearance: an inheritance Bauer’s compelling chapter on the medieval or Japanese. (Wisely, from his flu-victim grandfather seeded the Voynich manuscript occupies one-sixth of the Bauer offers no theories of his own.) family’s property empire. book. In his 1967 The Codebreakers, cryptog- Unsolved! digs into the riches of ancient As the centenary of this monumental raphy historian David Kahn called the manu- Viking, Roman, Greek and Egyptian cryptog- event approaches, other volumes on the script “the longest, the best known, the most raphy. Egyptologists tend to avoid tackling the pandemic will undoubtedly appear. Pale tantalizing, the most heavily attacked, the latter because of its sheer complexity. Bauer Rider sets the bar very high. ■ most resistant, and the most expensive of his- reveals how Caesar’s cipher worked, substi- torical cryptograms”. Its weird colour illustra- tuting each plain-text letter with a letter a Tilli Tansey is professor of the history of tions and indecipherable calligraphy attract fixed number of places away in the alphabet. modern medical sciences at Queen Mary, 16% of online traffic to the library at Yale Uni- Inexplicably, however, he relegates to an end- University of London. versity in New Haven, Connecticut, where note the undeciphered Phaistos disc found e-mail: [email protected] it is held (A. Robinson Nature 539, 28–29; on Crete in 1908 — the only example of its