Cholera—the dehydration disease that can be fatal in just one or two days—has been one of mankind's most tenacious and enigmatic adversaries. Its well-documented history is the story of the vagaries of a disease that originated in the Ganges delta, where it causes annual epidemics, whose European incarnation is as old as the Battle of Waterloo, and which was responsible for six pandemics in the nineteenth century alone, three reaching the United States, claiming 300,000 lives altogether. This book records the role of U.S. medical science in the most recent—and finally...