Nor was there any great medical breakthrough that would lend the story a climactic moment of triumph. Doctors frantically tried to produce a vaccine, but their efforts were doomed from the start because they mistakenly believed that Spanish flu was caused by a bacterium. In actuality the culprit was a virus, which is much smaller and attacks the body differently, and scientists weren’t able to examine and categorize different viruses until the invention of the electron microscope in the 1930s. Even then,
