The Many Mary Mallons
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.
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