Poverty and Cholera (February 1963 | Volume: 14, Issue: 2)

Poverty and Cholera

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Authors: Bruce Catton

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February 1963 | Volume 14, Issue 2

It would of course be comforting to think that this moral obtuseness was peculiar to Englishmen. It seems, however, to have been prevalent in America as well, and the cholera epidemics of the last century bring the thing into focus.

In 1832 the first epidemic of Asiatic cholera struck the United States. It was a complete mystery; no one knew what caused it or how it was transmitted, but since it passed most rapidly through areas where water and food supplies could be contaminated—and such areas were numerous in American cities of the 1830’s— it seemed likely that cholera was a natural accompaniment of filth, misery, vice, and intemperance. Loose living, in short, brought on cholera, and the man who died of it probably had himself to blame. It attacked mostly “the very scum of the cities,” and the scum would not have caught it if its members had not consented to be part of the scum.

The case is analyzed in The Cholera Years , by Charles E. Rosenberg, a book which can properly be taken as a sort of sequel to Mrs. Woodham-Smith’s study of the Irish famine. The epidemic of 1832 was wholly incomprehensible to the people of that time, and medical science was incompetent to provide any solution. All anyone could see was that the disease raged most violently in the slums, which were full of ignorant immigrants who perversely chose to live in filth and poverty. It seemed evident that cholera struck chiefly at the sinner and the poor, who had brought it on themselves. The sinner, intemperate in all things, laid himself wide open, obviously, and the poor man usually was poor because he was intemperate, improvident, and more or less immoral, and so what happened to both was nothing less than a Godly man might have anticipated. All in all, cholera appeared to be a result of increased immigration.

So the epidemic of 1832 was dismissed as a natural result of the evil ways of ignorant people who probably ought not to have come to America in the first place. There was another outbreak in 1849, but once again “the well-nourished, the prudent, and the temperate” —that is, the people who had money enough to live in decent surroundings, and who could flee the city when the infection spread—seemed to escape; which only emphasized the fact that the epidemic must be a natural visitation on those who chose to live in slums.

The Cholera Years , by Charles E. Rosenberg. University of Chicago Press. 257 pp. $5.95.

At the same time, it began to dawn on people that there was some sort of connection between lack of public sanitation and the outbreak of cholera, and now and again right-living people who did not prefer to live in slums were stricken. It remained clear that most cholera victims had only themselves to blame, but there were exceptions, and perhaps something could be done. One journalist suggested