An example of the Catalan “auca” genre devoted to cholera, one whose rhymed couplets I won’t pretend to translate in full. A contented couple learns the city will be visited by cholera and copes using the nostrums available, including chasing after an elusive vaccine. They incur fumigation along their journey, returning weakened and resigned to await the microbes.
(La Esquella de la torratxa, Barcelona, 1885)
The cartoon features panels for Uruguay (hunger), Argentina (debt), and Chile (military strife), but it is the Brazilian one (yellow fever) that is relevant for our purposes:
There is silver and fever that’s a killer,
but it’s more the fever than the silver.
(Caras y Caretas, Montevideo, 1891)
(Le Triboulet, Paris, 1884)
You didn’t count on me, wretch!
You thought you might be able to take a break in Algeria?
Would you like to leave Italy soon!
Finally! (What the Panama Vermouth pursuing the cholera figure is meant to signal is not entirely clear to me, but at the height of French attempts to dig a canal through Panama, huge quantities of quinine were consumed to fight tropical diseases, and it was common to dissolve sulphate of quinine in vermouth for consumption every morning before breakfast.)
He followed him fifteen paces behind…
Come on, outside!
Beware of the grapeshot!
More often than you will stop in China to poison our soldiers!
(The “anticholera Panama Vermouth” would appear to confirm the assumption above.)
Come on, let’s get away!…
And faster than that!
They were frantic races
from Timbuktu to Kamchatka…
…describing rapid circles around the globe…
“What the hell! Chasing me even to Paris! I’ll just have to go to the New World.”
“Where I will join you, rascal!”
…and inexorably pursued by his powerful enemy.
An undated drawing (probably 1830s) available at the National Libary of Medicine. This would appear to be a Dutch version of a German print by Peter Carl Geissler. See also the Portrait of a man protected against cholera.
(A cartoon by Adolphe Willette in Arsène Alexandre, L’art du rire et de la caricature, 1892)
“So you’re coming directly from Egypt? Where is Egypt again?”
“Egypt lies in the zone left of the equator which is called heat in geography. It borders in the north on the quarantine, in the south on the Turkish army, in the west on biblical history, and runs into the English ambassador in the east.” (Remaining text continues in this vain, mocking the traveller’s false erudition.)
(Fliegende Blätter, Munich, 1869)
O Malho [The Sledgehammer] (solemnly, to Joe Public): “Drawing your attention to the Bastille of Routine, I celebrate in the best possible way the great date of the French Revolution and the date of my second centenary! Those five diggers [with public health official Oswaldo Cruz on the right, holding a syringe] have already demolished a lot, but there is still a lot to do… Down with any remaining attachment to the status quo!”
Joe Public: “Me as well! I want schools! I want housing for the poor! I want a steady fight against tuberculosis! … Let there be money!“
(O Malho, Rio de Janeiro, 1906)
“This is outrageous! It’s reached forty degrees!”
“Don’t be surprised; it’s the typhoid fever.”
(El Mentidero, Madrid, 1915)
“How old do you think I am, Gedeón?”
“You bear it on your arm. Six shots… thirty-six years old! And pardon me for saying so.”
(Gedeón, Madrid, 1909)
“As vaccinations increase, deaths are becoming more numerous!”
“You have to be fair… they might be dying from the vaccine, but not from cholera!”
(Le Charivari, Paris, 1885)
From O Malho, Rio de Janeiro, 1908.
When the Indians revolted and did not want to give him supplies, Christopher Columbus told them that because of this, the sun would disappear. It was a stratagem; Colombo knew there was going to be an eclipse of the sun. When it started, the savages submitted and worshiped him…
And since in many things the people of today differ little from the savages of that time, Dr. Oswaldo Cruz, who only works for the good, can also employ a stratagem. The Hachette journal puts out an illustration showing that vaccinations in Paris are chic…
…put out the word to the up-to-date people of Botafogo [upscale beachfront neighborhood in Rio]. Soon there will not be enough vaccinators. The whole arroz aristocracy will make a real advance in the lancets of public health.
For the other popular classes in Rio: washerwomen, shysters, soldiers, innkeepers, Dr. Oswaldo will say that the “crum” [raw?] inoculated vaccine will give everyone the ability to foretell and enjoy good fortune in the numbers game [illegal gambling]…
The vaccination posts will then be insufficient to contain the crowd of those agitating to get in…
“This year we have over 60 doctors in medicine…”
“Oh my! We will have bubonic plague for a long time.”
(Revista da Semana, Rio de Janeiro, 1900)
A sleeping sickness cartoon that is actually more about workplace discipline.
(Caras y caretas, Buenos Aires, 1936)
“So you think that only the lack of vaccine is what causes the smallpox epidemic to explode, grow, and worsen? What! There is also a lack of cleanliness in the city. Have you noticed how the streets are, from Campo de Santa Anna upwards? It is dust, garbage, and stagnant water everywhere… I have never seen such mediocre service. At this point we’ve been walking backwards like the crab!…”
“And City Hall?”
“What City Hall?! …”
(O Malho, Rio de Janeiro, 1908)
At a vaccination station: Our mayor has joined the antivaxxers, and since then the intellectuals are raving about vaccination and storming the stations.
(Wiener Caricaturen, Vienna, 1912)
Sic Transit Pestilentia 