The story of the course of the typhus and cholera epidemics that swept through New York City in 1892. It is told from the point of view of those involved - the public health doctors who diagnosed and treated the victims, the newspaper reporters who covered the stories, the government officials who established and enforced policy, and the immigrants themselves. Drawing on rarely cited stories from the Yiddish American press, immigrant diaries and letters, and official accounts, Howard Markel follows the immigrants on their journey from a squalid and precarious existence in Russia's Pale of Settlement, to their passage in steerage, to New York's Lower East Side, to the city's quarantine islands. At a time of renewed anti-immigrant sentiment and emerging infectious diseases, the work provides a historical context for considering some of the significant problems that face American society today.