Two centuries before COVID-19, another frightening and novel disease ravaged the Gangetic Plain in northern India and what is now Bangladesh. The disease was known variously as the Asiatic, epidemic, spasmodic, or malignant cholera — or simply cholera. Between 1817 and 1832, physicians and lay observers paid careful attention to the movement of the disease, as well as the kinds of places it gravitated toward geographically.
Of course, cholera remains a horrific disease even to this day. But from the perspective of nineteenth-century observers, it was also an unusual disease compared to previous epidemics. The progressive movement of cholera perplexed physicians; it seemed like the disease could pop up anywhere at any time. Following certain protocols of hygiene, health, and morality could protect one from cholera, but not always reliably so. It could strike whole populations at once, yet sometimes spared entire streets. Some populations seemed particularly vulnerable: poor, “degraded,” “intemperate,” and, above all, Black populations, each group a part of a kind of choleraic underclass.7 And yet, cholera could strike down anyone.
Fear of contagion loomed large in the minds of laypersons like Deborah Norris Logan, a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker. As “Old Dr Martin” attended “with great kindness” to one of Logan’s acquaintances who was sick with cholera, she fretted for the doctor’s health: “I hope he will escape it.”8 However, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia reassured the city’s Board of Health that no “appreciable connexion” had been established “between the full and frequent intercourse of physicians, nurses, attendants, and friends, with the sick of Cholera, and the number of the former who have been attacked with the disease.”9
Intimacy with cholera patients appeared to have no bearing on one’s likelihood of contracting the disease. Not just physicians and nurses, but all those who tended to the sick seemed to be strangely immune to the affliction of those in their charge. A special committee of the Medical Society of Philadelphia reported several instances “where one member of a family has been attacked with cholera and died, while the relatives and friends, who nursed the patient, even occupied the same bed at night, and performed the usual offices to the body after death, have remained free from the disease.”10 Caregivers were not falling ill — or, if they were, it was due to fear, worry, or exhaustion, rather than cholera. In 1832, physicians felt no need to physically distance themselves from their cholera patients, and in fact felt compelled not to. Treating cholera according to the nineteenth-century model of treatment required active, sustained care — continuous rubbing of limbs, periodic bathing of breasts — as well as intimate exposure to patients’ bodily orifices and the fluids they spewed.