5Office of the Health Commissioner
City of New York
July 1883
Dr. Cyril Elson sat at his desk in lower Manhattan and began to sip the cup of hot tea that his secretary had just brought to him. A meticulous man, he believed in process and order, and he ran the Office of the Health Commissioner accordingly. He did not suffer fools lightly and drove his staff to the maximum limits of their abilities. A graduate of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, he was an acknowledged authority on the burgeoning specialty of infectious diseases. Arriving punctually at the office every morning at 8:00 A.M., he expected his newspaper to be on the left side of his desktop and the daily field reports to be in a neat stack on the right side of the desktop. After perusing The New York
