The postal service was famously efficient, closer to e-mail than the appropriately nicknamed “snail mail” of today; a letter posted at nine a.m. would reliably find its way to its recipient across town by noon. (The papers of the day were filled with aggrieved letters to the editor complaining about a mailing that took all of six hours to find its destination.) But if person-to-person communication was shockingly swift, mass communication was less reliable. Newspapers were the only source of daily information about the wider state of the city, but for some reason the Broad Street outbreak went
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