"Thomas Wolfe wrote a literary masterpiece about the death of his brother. More fabled is how influenza altered the decision-making abilities of President Woodrow Wilson and his chief aide, Colonel Edward House. Both were in Europe to attend the Paris Peace Conferences—the famed gathering where Wilson hoped to sell his Points and establish a League of Nations. Colonel House, who arrived in Europe just weeks before the Armistice, contracted a severe bout of flu as he was negotiating with the other nations. In late February, as he was recuperating from his serious illness, Colonel House noted that, “When I fell ill in January, I lost the thread of affairs and I am not sure that I have ever gotten fully back.” To make matters worse, when Wilson was in Paris in mid-March, to work with the Big Four in the final stages of a comprehensive peace treaty, he, too, was stricken by influenza. Volumes have been written on how influenza may have altered the terms and negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles as it ravaged the bodies and thoughts of Woodrow Wilson and Edward House, among others. While social historians of medicine warn against focusing too heavily on the illnesses of great men or the landmark cures of great doctors, the fact remains that when a world leader is struck down by influenza, in the midst of a pandemic that is accompanied by other global crises, the microbes’ power can be amplified above and beyond the symptoms it produces or the death it causes."