Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Geoffrey W. Rice. Black Flu 1918: The Story of New Zealand's Worst Public Health Disaster. Christchurch, N.Z.: Canterbury University Press, 2017. 96 pp. Ill. $29.99 (978-1-927145-95-1).

In Black Flu 1918, Geoffrey W. Rice looks to the influenza pandemic (called "Black Flu" because some victims experienced severe cyanosis "reminiscent of the 14th-century Black Death," p. 12) that killed nearly nine thousand New Zealanders and asks, "Could it happen again?" Rice specifically wrote Black Flu 1918 for New Zealand secondary school students, designing this resource as a condensed and updated version of his 2005 book, Black November, a national-level study of the 1918 pandemic based on death certificates.¹ Black Flu's chapters, which include a variety of images, examine the disease itself, the role of World War I in its spread, its arrival in New Zealand, and how the nation responded to the disaster. [End Page 408]