Father Knickerbocker: “Great heavens! is this all my descendants can do to keep this great city healthy!”
Representative of the Street-Cleaning Department [likely Irish]: “If yez think yez can swape a mile of strate a day wid sich a brum better nor me, yez better thry it.”
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, New York, 1879 (via Library of Congress)
“So you had the measles? I had it too, and by the way it was very serious.”
“Mine was much more serious. I had it on vacation!”
(Gutiérrez, Madrid, 1928)
“Do you know that Lolita has declared herself…?” [i.e., she has been spoken for?]
“At last…! Who?”
“No one, gals, it was measles that declared itself three days ago.”
(Buen humor, Madrid, 1923) (shaky on the idiom)
Our Editorial office and the ailment of the day.
(De ware Jacob, 1903)
“You see, my dear, the way things are going, I have terrible fear of catching the flu.”
“Oh, you really mean to say you’re afraid that the flu will catch you.”
(Nebelspalter, Zurich, 1892) (In a similar vein, this Polish cartoon.) (And similar French pun.)
What will I get for Christmas? A bullet, a noose, or the cholera?
(De ware Jacob, 1909)
“Be careful not to puke from that stinkadorus, because then they’ll put you in the barracks for the cholera!”
(De ware Jacob, 1909)
(Sydney Punch, 1867)
(Sydney Punch, 1875)
(Sydney Punch, 1867)
Affected Swell: “Aw–I say–Mr. Jones–did you evah see the horwid small pawks?”
Jones (funny man): “Oh! Yes–had one for dinner on Sunday–sucking pigs, you know, we call’ em.”
(Swell collapses)
(Sydney Punch, 1881)
How it originated in Sydney.
A story of putridoxcinnation.
(Truth, Brisbane, 1913) (Follow the link for the extended verses that accompany this; I include a couple below.)
In our Southern clime, in a healthy time, when trade was slack with the coffin-makers,
When the hearses’ teams chewed their oats in dreams, and a lifeless trade was the undertakers’,
Came a grisly pair labeled ‘Death’ and ‘Scare’–for the visit the last bedmakers thanked ’em–
And settled them down for a time in town, in a crazy Sydney doctor’s sanctum.
……….
What was left of the scare was a small affair not calling for further consideration–
There was no smallpox. IT WAS PUTRID OX that menaced Old Sydney with decimation.
The major of ‘s Gravenhage has forbidden a large demonstration for Universal Suffrage and Voting Rights on the grounds that the Medical Inspector did not consider it desirable, at this time when cholera threatens us, to gather a great multitude of persons from all parts of the country!
(Abraham Prikkie’s op- en aanmerkingen, Rotterdam, 1892)
BRAM: “Halt, Royal Quartermaster! The law applies to all of us!”
ROYAL QUARTERMASTER: “The laws fall silent before weapons and trumpets!”
Cholera: “I’m just going to go; there is so little for me to contribute here in the Netherlands!”
Auntie Lien: “Are you leaving already?”
Cholera: “Would you still like me to stay?”
Auntie Lien: “I don’t know… since you’ve been here the authorities have been doing so much for the people. You are actually the only one they can be bothered with. You interfere so emphatically… and then we get good drinking water; you only have to stick your nose over the border and then garbage piles are cleared away, hovels are condemned, you are…!”
Cholera: “Oh, Miss Prickie! You flatter me too much!”
(Abraham Prikkie’s op- en aanmerkingen, Rotterdam, 1892)
Smith’s Weekly, Sydney, 1919
Sic Transit Pestilentia 