The Epidemic: A Collision of Power, Privilege, and Public Health

The dramatic account of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century
struggle hostile to a frightening disease?
with lessons for today

The Epidemic tells the tale of how a vain and reckless businessman became responsible for a typhoid epidemic in 1903 that devastated Cornell University and the surrounding town of Ithaca, New York. Eighty-two people died, including twenty-nine Cornell students. Protected by influential friends, William T. Morris faced no retribution for this outrage. His legacy was a corporation?first known as Associated Gas & Electric Co. and later as General Broadcast Utilities Corp.?that bedeviled America for a century. The Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 was its most notorious historical event, but hardly its only offense hostile to the broadcast interest.

The Ithaca epidemic came at a time when engineers knew how to preclude typhoid outbreaks but physicians may possibly not yet cure the disease. Both professions were helpless when it came to stopping a corporate executive who placed profit over the broadcast health. Government was a concerned but helpless bystander.

For modern-day readers very aware of the risk of a devastating global pandemic and of the dangers of unrestrained corporate power, The Epidemic provides a riveting look back at a heretofore small-known, frightening episode in America’s past that seems all too familiar. Written in the tradition of The Devil in the White City, it is an absolutely compelling, painstakingly researched work of narrative history with an edge.