At the ASH annual meeting each December, the science of blood, health, and disease brings together more than 30,000 hematologists from around the world for a vigorous discussion and exchange of ideas. The editors of the Blood journal take this opportunity to highlight the intersection of hematology and the humanities in bringing to light the epic story of blood. Past presenters have included Lawrence Hill, the author of Blood: The Stuff of Life, Douglas Starr the author of Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce, Tom Brokaw, the former NBC News anchor and author of A Lucky Life Interrupted. and most recently, the late Paul Farmer, Kolokotrones University Professor and the chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School whose session: Irrigating the Clinical Desert: Lessons from Haiti and Rwanda is freely available on the ASH website in tribute to his contributions to humanity and medicine.

John M. Barry has had considerable influence on both pandemic policy and flood protection. Both the Bush and Obama administrations sought his advice on influenza preparedness and response, and he was a member of the original team which developed plans for non-pharmaceutical interventions to mitigate a pandemic. Barry has served on advisory boards at M.I.T’s Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health as well as on the board of the Society of American Historians. John M. Barry is Distinguished Scholar at both the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and Tulane's Bywater Institute. Barry concludes in The Great Influenza that "The final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that...those in authority must retain the public's trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best. A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete. Only then will people be able to break it apart." John M. Barry will address the pandemic of the past as well as the present in context of the history of American medicine.