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On 16 November 2010, news broke that people in disaster-struck Haiti were rioting against UN Peacekeepers and medical workers, preventing the latter from dealing with a major outbreak of cholera. The rioters believed the disease had been brought into their country by the Nepalese troops of MINUSTAH, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (the Nepalese were later cleared of the smear). By impeding the aid workers, the riots were actually causing more people to die of the disease.

We’ve been here before. When Asiatic cholera first attacked Britain in 1831–32, riots broke out in several urban areas, the targets being doctors, who were frequently prevented from attending to the sick. Typical was the scene in March 1832 in the Gorbals area of Glasgow: “The mob pelted the medical men with mud and stones, shouting, “medical murderer!” “cholera humbug!” and “Burkers!”[1] Liverpool suffered no less than eight anti-medical riots between 29 May and 10 June 1832.[2]

The primary cause was a fear of body snatching. The Burke and Hare trial of 1828, and the continuing work of the ‘resur­rection men’, had annihilated working-class faith in the medical pro­fession. It was widely believed that, with graveyards now well protected by watchmen, doctors were seeking alternative ways to harvest corpses for dissection. The obvious method was to poison drinking water with cholera. On 26 March 1832, body-snatching tools were discovered at the Moss, a newly constructed cholera burial ground in Paisley. The follow­ing day, a mob attacked the Cholera Hospital and every doctor’s dwelling in the city, even demolishing the van used to transport the dead. In response, 22 Paisley doctors resigned their posit­ions at the Hospital, and refused to care for any further cholera cases. Conflation between body snatching and cholera was also at the heart of the Liverpool riots.

Conflict could also erupt from ethnic or religious tensions. The official regulat­ions on disposal of the dead were designed to prevent contagion, and typically involved wrapping the corpse tightly in linen, then a speedy burial close to the Cholera Hospital via a hurried open-air service. For many Irish Catholics, this violated numerous burial traditions: “The Irish were espec­ially outraged by the improper and hasty burials and they sometimes managed to hold off the authorities when they came to bury the body.”[3]

Meanwhile, evangelicals of various persuasions promulgated the view that the epidemic was divine punishment for the sins of the nation, and Church authorities recommended prayers, fasts and days of public humiliation to plac­ate what RJ Morris called “The God of Cholera”. A much-noted sermon by Thomas Arnold was an attempt by a religious moderate to counter this archaic thinking.

Large posters proclaiming “Cholera Humbug!” were put up in Glasgow and elsewhere, and the phrase was a widespread marker of the belief that the disease was manufactured by the doctors, or did not exist at all. The posters advocated resistance against the cholera laws and the doctors. But who exactly was the source of the humbug depended on your political perspective. Agitation had been intense both for and against the Reform Bill, which would see the extension of the voting franchise and the curtailment of some areas of privilege (it was passed on 4 June 1832). The coincidence of the cholera outbreak occurring in the same timeframe as the debate over Reform brought the two separate issues into alignment: “One party discovered the cause in a movement for the disestablishment of religion. Another considered it was a judgment from God for asking for the Reform Bill. The Radicals proclaimed it to be a trick of the Tories to prevent agitation for reform.”[4] Many reform-minded individuals, such as William Cobbett, the radical pamphleteer, were in no doubt that the “hobgoblin” of cholera was an invention of the Establishment, for typical money-grabbing reasons:

CHOLERA HUMBUG! – Inhabitants of Lambeth, be not imposed upon by the villainously false report that the Asiatic Cholera has reached London. A set of half-starved doctors, apothecaries’ clerks, and jobbers in the parish funds, have endeavoured to frighten the nation into a lavish expenditure; with the Government they have succeeded in carrying a bill [the Cholera Act] which will afford fine pickings. [5]

Religious conservatives, political conservatives, political radicals and the disenfranchised alike were united in the belief that the official position was some form of conspiracy or manipulat­ion (sound familiar?). Political forces tried to use the outbreak as a means of pushing their views on the Reform Bill. As a consequence, the medical author­ities were often ignored or derided, and those who were working tirelessly to treat the sick and dying were attacked and forced to abandon their patients. By the time the disease had run its course in the winter of 1832, cholera had claimed 52,000 lives.

On 20 November 2010 came news that the demonstrations in Haiti had spread to the capitol, Port-au-Prince, while UN officials were openly suggesting the violence had been politically motivated to disrupt the scheduled elect­ions. Meanwhile, 1,200 people were known to have died of the disease. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.



Notes
1 RJ Morris: Cholera 1832: The Social Response to an Epidemic, Croom Helm, 1976, p109.
2 Sean Burrell & Geoffrey V Gill: “The Liverpool Cholera Epidemic of 1832 and Anatomical Dissection – Medical Mistrust and Civil Unrest” in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Oct 2005, v60 n4, p478.
3 AS Wohl: Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain, Routledge, 1984, p20.
4 James Napier: Folk Lore: or Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within this Century, Alex. Gardner, Paisley, 1879, p20.
5 William Cobbett: “Cholera Morbus” in Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register (25 Feb 1832), v75, n9, p523.