Abstract
SHORTLY after the first of January, I867, Mark Twain began to realize that he was on a plague ship. Boarding the San Francisco at Greytown, Nicaragua, he had anticipated a pleasant voyage to New York. Now, however, he was alarmed by the increasing number of deaths among his fellow passengers-and anything but reassured by the official diagnosis of the disease as only a virulent sort of diarrhea. Accordingly, Twain sought out the ship's surgeon, t'a most excellent young man, a Mason and a first-rate physician: Discovering that he was a Mason, I took him aside and asked him [for] a plain statement for myself alone, and told him I thought I was man enough to stand the truth, in its worst form. He then said that the disease was cholera and of the most virulent type-that he had done all a man could do, but he had no medicines to work with-that he had shipped the first time this trip and found the locker empty, and no time to make a requisition for more medicines.'
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