498
Physicians, meanwhile, struggled to treat the disease.
Some prescribed opium or whiskey, others chloroform or
strychnine. One physician claimed that a sick patient rallied
after drinking four or five glasses of champagne. Scholars
doubt that any treatment did much good. Prevention was
the only way to fight cholera.
In 1866, in response to another cholera outbreak,
New York City established a Metropolitan Board of Health
to clean up cisterns and garbage. The success of these
measures prompted the city to build an extensive net-
work of aqueducts to bring clean water from distant
reservoirs and watersheds. The city’s clean water became
one of its main assets.
Elsewhere, the situation was less encouraging. In
February 1873 cholera hit New Orleans and spread up the
Mississippi River, ravaging low-lying urban areas where
drinking water had been contaminated with sewage.
Nashville was one such city. The city’s pumping station
was originally located upriver, far to the east of the city. ButU
rbanization during the nine-
teenth century contributed to
the modernization of the nation, but
it also brought an ancient disease to
the United States: cholera. Cholera
did not kill as many people as
malaria or tuberculosis, but it was
probably the most terrifying disease
of the century. Cholera was new to
the United States, and its symptoms
were gruesome. People were
stricken, sometimes in mid-stride,
with severe abdominal cramps.
Unremitting diarrhea followed, often
culminating in dehydration and kid-
ney failure. About half of those who
contracted the disease died.
The disease had centuries earlier
originated on the overcrowded banks
of the Ganges River in India. In early
1831 the disease appeared in eastern
Europe and moved steadily westward.
In January 1832 it surfaced in
England. Health officials in the United
States then braced for an onslaught.
In June an outbreak of cholera in
Montreal prompted wealthy New
Yorkers to flee. On June 26 cases
appeared in New York City. Soon
afterward the disease spread west-
ward along the Erie Canal and then
into cities in the Great Lakes region
and along the Ohio and Mississippi
rivers. Simultaneously it struck
Charleston, South Carolina, and New
Orleans, Louisiana.
During the next fifty years cholera outbreaks were fairly
common during summer. In 1849 and 1866 it swept through
the nation, taking tens of thousands of lives. Most people
believed that cholera spread directly from one person to
another by bodily contact. When it hit a city, neighboring
communities would close the roads and governors called
out militias to keep infected persons away. Because cholera
outbreaks often appeared first in impoverished tenement
districts, immigrants were often blamed for the disease.
But after a cholera epidemic killed nearly 14,000 people
in London in 1849, John Snow, a physician, determined that
most of those who contracted cholera drew their drinking
water from the lower Thames River; people served by an
upriver pumping station rarely fell ill from the disease. Snow
concluded that infected people with diarrhea passed a “poi-
son” into the Thames, which people downriver ingested. (In
1883 Robert Koch identified Snow’s “poison”: it was a
comma-shaped bacterium.)
MAPPING THE PAST
Cholera: A New Disease
Strikes the Nation
In this cartoon, Boss Tweed welcomes cholera—a skeletal figure of death carrying a handbag
from “Asia”—into the rat-infested and filthy slums of New York. Fear of cholera and other
diseases led to the creation of powerful public bodies, relatively free from political interference,
to promote sanitation and clean water.