Epidemics Empire and Environments Cholera in Madras and Quebec City 1818-1910 1st Edition by Michael Zeheter ISBN 0822944464 978-0822944461

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Product details: 

ISBN 10:0822944464 

ISBN 13:978-0822944461

Author:Michael Zeheter 

Throughout the nineteenth century, cholera was a global scourge against human populations. Practitioners had little success in mitigating the symptoms of the disease, and its causes were bitterly disputed. What experts did agree on was that the environment played a crucial role in the sites where outbreaks occurred. In this book, Michael Zeheter offers a probing case study of the environmental changes made to fight cholera in two markedly different British colonies: Madras in India and Quebec City in Canada. The colonial state in Quebec aimed to emulate British precedent and develop similar institutions that allowed authorities to prevent cholera by imposing quarantines and controlling the disease through comprehensive change to the urban environment and sanitary improvements. In Madras, however, the provincial government sought to exploit the colony for profit and was reluctant to commit its resources to measures against cholera that would alienate the city’s inhabitants. It was only in 1857, after concern rose in Britain over the health of its troops in India, that a civilizing mission of sanitary improvement was begun. As Zeheter shows, complex political and economic factors came to bear on the reshaping of each colony’s environment and the urgency placed on disease control.

Table of contents: 

1. For the Anglican archdeacon of Quebec, G. J. Mountain, the sermon delivered on 30 December 1832 was an opportunity to reflect on the events of the almost bygone year. It had not been a good one. During the summer and autumn an epidemic of Asiatic cholera had had the city of Quebec in its grip. Cholera had been a traumatic experience of death and suffering that had cost hundreds their lives. Thus, sorrow was the dominant theme of Mountain’s homily, although even in retrospect only God seemed to offer a plausible explanation for cholera’s behavior. The disease’s ways had been…

2. Part I. First Encounters

   • Among Europeans, India—and the tropics in general—had an unflattering reputation for being unhealthy. Medical experts deemed the subcontinent’s climate to be especially harmful for Europeans, and surgeons had been warily observing the environment there ever since the British had arrived. The emergence of cholera as a recurring threat to individuals and the public during the second decade of the nineteenth century sharpened this negative view in all parts of British India. The disease forced the colonial authorities and their medical experts to turn their attention to the local environment they inhabited, as was the case in the city…

      

   • In 1824, in his Report on Epidemic Cholera in the Madras Presidency, William Scot had expressed his hope that Britain’s medical professionals would use his work without the urgency of an outbreak of the disease compelling them to do so.¹ It took cholera only a few years to render this sentiment obsolete. The slow but steady movement of the disease, which reached Russia and then central Europe in 1830, raised alarms all over the continent and increased the demand for information on a disease European physicians considered new. Scot’s report was soon translated into German and French.² Reginald Orton, who…

      

     Part II. Integrating SanitationBy the 1830s, the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions had profoundly changed Britain, but nowhere were their effects more devastatingly felt than in the cities and factory towns. Millions had moved there looking for work, though their meager wages could pay for only crowded accommodations and poor food. Social unrest and poverty were rife and so were many epidemic and endemic diseases that found numerous victims in those unhealthy conditions. Cholera was only one of these diseases, but the deadly outbreaks of the 1830s had demonstrated that the problem was in no way limited to the poor, though they had been…

     • While Quebec embraced sanitarianism quickly—at first primarily as a matter of status, then as a means of preventing epidemics—Madras faced a long road to universal acceptance of the principle. The government was extremely reluctant to invest substantial sums in infrastructure projects, fearing spiraling costs and unrest. Fundamentally opposed to this conservative position, medical practitioners and engineers within the colonial administration wanted progress. The sanitary movement provided them with an incentive to promote the already growing role of the professions within the government; implementing sanitation projects would result in not only a healthier and more civilized population but also…

        

     • After the departure of Governor Pottinger, the Madras government’s opposition to sanitary concepts began to crumble and the ideology of the civilizing mission gained momentum. This shift was not due to internal administrative developments, scientific advances, or improved engineering techniques but to external events. The sanitary movement had become the leading voice on public health in Britain, and the British campaign in the Crimean War had highlighted the disastrous results of poor hygiene practices in the army. In addition, after the Great Mutiny of 1857–58, when a considerable number of the Indian regiments of the army rebelled, the governments…

3. Part III. Bacteriology and the Promise of Clarity

   • By the 1870s, sanitary thinking had been accepted in Madras, the government and the municipality had instigated some profound changes to the urban environment, and cholera had tested the weaknesses of these first improvements. In Quebec, the shift in priorities toward a permanent structural alteration of the urban environment had been accepted more readily, but from the mid-1850s onward cholera was absent from Canada, so its effectiveness was still in doubt. Yet, as long as the disease was present in Europe or in the United States, the threat of another outbreak of cholera loomed over the city of Quebec, its…

      

     The Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918–19 put an end to the bacteriological promise of control over infectious disease. Spreading across the globe in three waves, the second being the most deadly, it turned out to be one of the most lethal pandemics in history. Millions succumbed, if not to influenza itself then to complications like pneumonia; many more were infected but eventually recovered.¹ Physicians and public health officials were confronted with an enormous number of cases of a normally rather benign disease that had now appeared in an extraordinarily deadly form. Medical treatment focused mainly on alleviating the symptoms…

      

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Michael Zeheter,Epidemics Empire,Environments