What a Past Epidemic Teaches Us About Ebola: Lessons from the cholera scare of 1892
Howard Markel in “What a Past Epidemic Teaches Us About Ebola Lessons from the cholera scare of 1892” in the New Republic offers an interesting historical parallel with the contemporary Ebola hysteria. He begins:
“A deadly and somewhat mysterious infectious disease has invaded America in the person of a foreign traveler. The local management and the global magnitude of the epidemic are so dire that the President of the United States cuts short his political travel schedule and rushes back to the White House to manage the contagious crisis.
No, I’m not talking about the Ebola crisis of 2014. I’m talking about Asiastic cholera crisis of 1892—an afterthought in the history books, but a story that offers some valuable lessons for today.
It’s been more than a hundred years, so a lot has changed. Medical science is much more advanced. The world is a more interconnected place. But there are some important parallels between now and then. In some respects—the fear of travelers carrying the disease, the intense criticism of public health authorities—things haven’t changed much at all.
Asiatic cholera was spread by body fluids—especially the copious diarrhea it produced to the point of dehydrating a grown man in a matter of hours. Indeed, to the nineteenth-century American, cholera was every bit as scary, deadly, and disgusting as Ebola fever is today. The cholera of 1892 had already decimated much of India, the Middle East, Asia, and Eastern Europe and shut down the port of Hamburg, the largest in the world. By August 30, New York City, the world’s second largest port, began to receive its first cholera victims, mostly impoverished Russian Jewish immigrants.”
There are other similar episodes, including the flu epidemic in 1918-19. For the racial underside of the ebola “fearmongering,” click here.
KJ