Perspective: Stick It to Me

If you settled down at the kitchen table with the Saturday Evening Post in 1947, there’s a good chance the ad at right would have sent chills down your spine. It wasn’t because of the close-up shots of the purple-dyed microscope slides, nor the odd picture of the man in the face mask stabbing chicken eggs with a syringe. Instead, your shivers came from reading the ad’s first paragraph. Those words would have brought you back to your childhood—the year 1918, the year that 40 million people (very possibly your brother or sister, a parent or a neighbor) died within hours of contracting the Spanish Flu.