Secco Recit

This is a story about a sanitary engineer who made a career tracking and preventing epidemics -- especially epidemics which stubbornly refused to be tracked and prevented. This is also a story about checking and verifying sources, which features:  A 1903 typhoid fever outbreak at Cornell University and a conspiracy to cover up its cause. An abandoned hospital on a deserted island, where human entry is now forbidden. A mysterious casting change to a 1913 Broadway play. A conspiracy to falsify the results of an autopsy which never happened. Things that were cut from this story because it is already very long include: A 1912 preacher's calls to ban certain kinds of dancing. A 1908 study about the air quality of subway systems around the world that uses the brightness of meteors to estimate the height of the atmosphere. A speech inexplicably given by Alexander Graham Bell to the Biological Society A 1917 musical that probably made the aforementioned preacher very angry. ...

Preface One morning, several years ago, I thought it might be fun to figure out what the leading cause of death in sopranos is. In order to figure this out, I went to everyone's favorite opera statistics website  Operabase , pulled up their list of most frequently-performed operas, and set to work cataloguing the causes of death in the top fifty. I came up with some crude statistics, and this was all very hastily put-together. I made a mildly humorous Facebook post about it, and went along my merry way. Cue roughly three weeks ago, when the Metropolitan Opera announced that, for the duration of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, they would be streaming performances from their catalogue for free on their website, beginning with a performance of La Boheme , to be followed two days later by La Traviata . I was not the only one to note that it seemed a little lacking in tact for the company to begin their Coronavirus streams with the two popular operas whose plots can be explained by ...