Cholera 1832: The Social Response to an Epidemic
... 17 One-half to one-third of infected patients died. 18 Typhus caused epidemics with a 10% mortality rate; typhoid fever and dysentery were other common causes of outbreaks. Life expectancy at birth was 19-33 years. ...
To appreciate the current advances in the field of health care epidemiology, it is important to understand the history of hospital infection control. Available historical sources were reviewed for 4 different historical time periods: medieval, early modern, progressive, and post-World War II. Hospital settings for the time periods are described, with particular emphasis on the conditions related to hospital infections.
This article examines the spread of the cholera epidemic in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies during the reign of Ferdinand II of Bourbon, who succeeded his father Francis I in 1830. The terrible contagion struck the Bourbon kingdom in late 1835−early 1836 and 1837, aggravating its vulnerable condition and endangering a shaky throne. Not only did it cause a large number of casualties and riots, but also a ‘moral abyss’ reinforced by fears, old superstitions and false belief, which provided the cultural substrate for the spread of conspiracy theses (poisoning plots) and the outbreak of popular uprisings (cholera riots). The essay investigates from a cultural point of view—with some incursions into the history of emotions—the perception of the disease in the circle of doctors at the Bourbon court and among the clergy; how the king dealt with the health emergency, oscillating between paternalism and authoritarianism; how the epidemic generated social divisions and was instrumentalised both by the Sicilian secessionists, to influence political change, and, at the same time, by the royalists, who wanted to save the kingdom from liberal revolution.KeywordsEpidemicHistory of emotionsPhysiciansBourbon dynasty
In the spring of 1829 a shocking story appeared in the press. Alexander Sergeyevich Griboyedov, the former member of Paskevich’s staff who had delivered the signed copy of the Treaty of Turkmanchay to Nicholas I, and was then sent back to Tehran as Russia’s ambassador, was brutally murdered, along with almost all of the members of his legation, by an angry mob. Only Ivan Sergeyevich Maltzov survived. Like the murder in 1802 of Haji Khalil Khan-e Koroghlu Qazvini, Fath ‘Ali Shah’s ambassador to the EIC, the story of Griboyedov’s death garnered extensive coverage in the international press as the circumstances leading up to the mob’s attack and the official government response to it were outlined in minute detail. Although it was initially thought that ‘Abbas Mirza and his prime minister, Mirza Abu’l-Qasem), would travel to Tibilisi in order to offer an official apology to General Paskevich, it was later decided that this would be too risky, should the pair be held hostage until Persia remitted in full the indemnity it still owed Russia according to the terms of the Treaty of Torkmanchay. Instead, ‘Abbas Mirza’s 16 year old (seventh) son, Khosrow Mirza, was dispatched with a number of senior advisers to make the apology. When the young Persian envoy reached Tibilisi, however, Paskevich recommended that he proceed onwards to deliver his apology to the Russian Emperor in person.
This chapter studies three different stages of the literary imagination of cholera. It starts by considering the cultural shock caused by the first two cholera pandemics and weighs how that influenced apocalyptic discourses in literature (1826 to the 1860s). Then, it discusses the opposite tendency of denial which is linked to comic texts produced in the 1830s. Finally, it analyzes how these trends were transformed after the remarkable advances in bacteriology from the 1880s onward. By confronting these three facets of cholera’s representation, it is possible to identify its influence over the literature of the early twentieth century.
In this article, I examine how Greco-Islamic and clinical medicine competed in the context of cholera epidemics in 19th-century Iran. By close-reading medical texts in this period, I sketch out this competition by focusing on how ideas about cholera prevention and treatment centered on certain understandings of the sense of smell and taste. The main argument is that while in Greco-Islamic medicine, the gustatory and olfactory experiences involving cholera and its treatment received substantial attention, in the clinical approach these experiences were methodically avoided and contained.
Resumen Se realiza una revisión historiográfica de los principales episodios epidémicos sufridos por la humanidad desde la Prehistoria hasta el siglo XX, con el propósito de analizar la incidencia que han tenido las sucesivas enfermedades infecto-contagiosas en las diferentes sociedades en cada época, atendiendo a cuatro variables de estudio: la social, la económica, la política y la esfera de las mentalidades. Palabras clave Enfermedad, población, pobreza, crisis, estigmatización, manipulación.
Abstract A historiographic review of the main epidemic episodes suffered by humanity from Prehistory to the 20th century is carried out, with the aim of analyzing the incidence that successive infectious-contagious diseases had in different societies at each time, regarding four study variables: social, economic, political and mentalities.
India has been swept by pandemics of plague, influenza, smallpox, cholera and other diseases. The scale and impact of these events was often cataclysmic and writers offered a glimpse into the everyday life of ordinary people who lost their lives and livelihoods and suffered the angst and trauma of mental, physical and emotional loss. This paper focuses on the devastation caused by pandemics especially in the Ganges deltaic plains of India. Through selected texts of 20th century Hindi writers – Munshi Premchand, Phanishwar Nath Renu, Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, Bhagwan Das, Harishankar Parsai, Pandey Bechan Sharma – this paper aims to bring forth the suffering and struggles against violence, social injustices and public health crises in India during waves of epidemics and pandemics when millions died as they tried to combat the rampant diseases.
The article is devoted to the analysis of the process of the organization of centralized water supply systems in small Russian towns at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The causes and the process of pipeline building in three small cities, each of which became signifi cant transport hubs by 1914 and had populations of less than 50,000 people, are described in the research. The research interest in these towns is led by understanding how the transport position of small cities promoted the improvement of water supplies in them. It was essential due to the growth of the urban populations and increasing cases of cholera epidemics in transport-hub cities.
A study of Rio de Janeiro's hygiene movement during Brazil's early national period and its effects on state development.
Empowerment as a corollary of development is an attractive notion, but socioeconomic change has variable effects on women, which include the potential for disempowerment as well as empowerment. This is not a new phenomenon, for women’s present subordination is part of the history of their negotiations and renegotiations of what they can do or be.
The ‘Green Ground’ was the popular name for an irregularly shaped piece of land in the parish of St Clement Dane’s.1 It was for centuries the location of a graveyard which became notorious for its insanitary conditions and the numerous abuses which took place within it. As an extreme, but not necessarily untypical, example of inner-city graveyards, it featured prominently in campaigns by reformers in the early nineteenth century to close down the insanitary and overcrowded metropolitan graveyards.
The transfer of metaphors does not only take place between well-defined sciences: it is also a commonplace of what another contributor to this volume has called “everyday” language.1 Within that realm, however, the problem of transfer and the meaning of metaphors take on different dimensions. This paper, in discussing nineteenth-century uses of epidemic language to describe commercial crises, demonstrates some of these differences. For one thing, the strong claim that metaphor transfer plays a generative role in discovery is more difficult to sustain when the participants in a debate are interested in implementing policy (for example) rather than in forming new theories. The commercial reformers described below used metaphors to enrich the meaning of their new forms of action, but the actions themselves derived at least as much from professional interests and perceptions as from the intellectual content of the borrowed language. Related to this claim is the idea that everyday language, to a greater degree than self-consciously “scientific” discourse, is embedded in a more general moral discourse. As a result, the meaning of the metaphors is not as stable as in the more formal language of science, the purveyors of which at least make an effort to shelter themselves from wider moral concerns. Although instability of meaning is also present in the more restricted domain of “science,” its significance becomes more apparent as one descends from more to less technical discourse. As a result, the meaning of the metaphors is not a stable as in the more formal language of science, the purveyors of which a least make an effort to shelter themselves from wider moral concerns.
Men have always been changing and reconstructing their physical environment. How far that implied an improvement or worsening is an important question more easily brought forward than answered. The Dutch are supposed to have created their own country after God had created the world. The struggle with the water not only resulted in a physical, but also in a moral geography (Schama 1987). The countryside and the urban landscape, especially in the western parts of the country, was gained by dispelling the water, the sea and the rivers which originated in Switzerland and France and found their way to the sea through the Netherlands. Dealing with the physical environment is for that reason largely a question of dealing with water. In the process of industrialization and the speeding up of the urbanization, changes occurred in other sectors of this man-made environment. The industry itself influenced the environment by its buildings and by the industrial processes. Water pollution was joined by air and ground pollution.
This book focuses on the entwinement of politics and medicine and power and knowledge in India during the age of empire. Using the powerful metaphor of 'pathology' - the science of the origin, nature, and course of diseases - the author develops and challenges a burgeoning literature on colonial medicine, moving beyond discussions of state medicine and the control of epidemics to everyday life, to show how medicine was a fundamental ideology of empire. Related to this point, and engaging with postcolonial histories of biopower and modernity, the book highlights the use of this racially grounded medicine in the formulation of modern selves and subjectivities in late colonial India. In tracing the cultural determinants of biological race theory and contextualizing the understanding of race as pathology, the book demonstrates how racialism was compatible with the ideologies and policies of imperial liberalism. Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal brings together the study of modern South Asia, race theory, colonialism and empire and the history of medicine. It highlights the powerful role played by the idea of 'pathology' in the rationalization of imperial liberalism and the subsequent projects of modernity embraced by native experts in Bengal in the 'long' nineteenth century.
In early summer 1832, a new disease entered the Netherlands through the port of Scheveningen. During July and August the disease had spread throughout all major towns and cities in a nation-wide epidemic. In fact, the disease entered the Netherlands rather late. It had appeared in Moscow in September, 1830; it invaded the British Isles a year later; it made its dramatic impact on Paris in March, 1832.
John Snow’s leadership in epidemiology as well as anaesthesia resulted from his research as much as his clinical practice. In anaesthesia, Snow’s research concerned the regulation of concentrations of volatile agents and the development of efficient inhalers; the uptake and elimination of volatile agents; stages of anaesthesia; carbon dioxide metabolism and rebreathing; and metabolism in anaesthesia and the theory of anaesthesia. In epidemiology, Snow investigated the relationship of water supplies to mortality in cholera during the London epidemic in 1854, which led him to formulate an original and valid theory of the transmission of cholera. Snow’s research, which has received less attention than anecdotes concerning his career (e.g., his anaesthetizing Queen Victoria and urging removal of the handle of a contaminated water pump), was always directed towards solving specific problems. The significance of his research is evident in its leading not only to improvements in health care but also to the evolution of anaesthesia and epidemiology as professional disciplines.
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