One of the most interesting parts of my research was that I came to see the official indifference to the public's health as not a bug but a feature of this society. You see the elites routinely rejecting quarantine, and they spent very, very little money on sanitation—which was a big deal, especially because many people at this time thought that the disease is spread by miasma. People in New Orleans came to suspect that their city fathers were literally willing them to die.