And, finally, came the lungs. Physicians had seen lungs in such condition. But those lungs had not come from pneumonia patients. Only one known disease—a particularly virulent form of bubonic plague called pneumonic plague, which kills approximately 90 percent of its victims—ripped the lungs apart in the way this disease did. So did weapons in war. An army physician concluded, “The only comparable findings are those of pneumonic plague and those seen in acute death from toxic gas.” Seventy years after the pandemic, Edwin Kilbourne, a highly respected scientist who has spent much of his life
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