Fever of War examines the impact of the deadly 1918 influenza epidemic on the Ammrican army, its medical officers, and their profession. The targedy begins with overly confident medical officers whose inflated sense of their ability to prevent disease caused them to undermine the severity of the epidemic. The realities of the flu soon left officers' confidence in latters as their efforts to prevent the flu proved ineffective. At the same time, military leaders abandoned precautionary measures such as isolation and bed rest for affflicted soldiers. In their efforts to get men to the battlefield as quickly as possible, the Army packed as many bodies as possible onto transport ships and squeezed them into already overcrowded barracks, creating the perfect environment for the epidemic to thrive. Aware of their failure to win the fight against influenza, medical officers and militry leaders made little effort to include this particular story of the epidemic in both Army records and in medical reports on the epidemic.
