THE MODERNITY OF CHOLERA
The disease that redefined public sanitation in China
In 1870, a mysterious illness swept through Tianjin. As bodies piled up on the streets and filled the canals of the city, residents’ suspicions soon focused on an orphanage run by foreign missionaries, where nuns seemed keen on taking children in— but from which nobody ever saw the children leave, except in the coffins buried in a small cemetery behind the Catholic church.
Could the missionaries be practicing black magic? On June 21, 1870, a mob stormed the church and orphanage, killing over 60 people. Such is the power of epidemics to inspire fear, anxiety, and mass hysteria.
The killer was cholera, perhaps the most dreaded disease of the 19th century. It spread along the lines of transmission forged in the first great age of global interconnectedness, to which China was no exception. As merchants competed in the lucrative opium and tea trades, and soldiers arrived from around the world to fight wars along China’s coast, cholera came along with goods and people into China’s newly opened trading ports.
Like the rest of the world, China began to suffer repeated outbreaks of the disease, each bringing death and misery. During the peak of a pandemic, China’s largest cities, including Chongqing, Beijing, and Tianjin, might lose 5 percent of their population to the illness. One contemporary observer estimated that an outbreak of cholera in 1862 reduced the population around Shanghai and Songjiang by as much as 10 percent. The famous physician Wang Shixiong lamented during one outbreak that there were not enough coffins to bury the dead.
It wasn’t until late in the century that advances in public health, microbiology, and immunology began to have an effect in the fight against cholera and other infectious diseases. By the 1850s, researchers had
LATE IN THE CENTURY, ADVANCES IN PUBLIC HEALTH, MICROBIOLOGY, AND IMMUNOLOGY BEGAN TO HAVE AN EFFECT AGAINST INFECTIOUS DISEASES