Europe and elsewhere, by Mark Twain [pseud.] [with an appreciation by Brander Matthews and an introduction by Albert Bigelow Paine]

CHOLERA EPIDEMIC IN HAMBURG
average notice is often refreshed with a whiff of
business at the end.
The ioo formal notices in the Hamburg paper did
not mean merely IOO deaths; each told of one death,
but many of them told of more-in some cases they
told of four and five. In the same issue there were
132 one-line death notices. If the dates of these
deaths were all stated, the 232 notices together could
be made the basis of a better guess at the current
mortality in Hamburg than the "official" reports
furnished, perhaps. You would know that a certain
number died on a certain day who left behind them
people able to publish the fact and pay for it. Then
you could correctly assume that the vast bulk of
that day's harvest were people who were penniless
and left penniless friends behind. You could add your
facts to your assumption and get some sort of idea of
the death rate, and this would be strikingly better than
the official reports, since they give you no idea at all.
To-day a physician was speaking of a private
letter received here yesterday from a physician in
Hamburg which stated that every day numbers of
poor people are snatched from their homes to the
pest houses, and that that is the last that is heard
of a good many of them. No intelligible record is
kept; they die unknown and are buried so. That
no intelligible record is kept seems proven by the
fact that the public cannot get hold of a burial list
for one day that is not made impossible by the record
of the day preceding and the one following it.
What I am trying to make the reader understand
is, the strangeness of the situation here-a mighty
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