“What do you mean, you want to force me to quarantine at the Spanish border?”
“Your majesty will pardon us, Sire, we are only carrying out your orders. You have imposed a quarantine on all travelers coming from countries infested by cholera or plague…”
“Well!”
“But, Sire, your Majesty is coming from France and could bring us the republic.”
(Le Triboulet, Paris, 1883)
(Le Triboulet, Paris, 1884)
To avoid cholera:
1. Be clean
2. Be sober
3. Don’t walk too much
4. Don’t eat ice cream
5. Smoke in moderation
6. Beware of humidity
(signed) Dr. Koch
Cazot is bound to catch the microbe, since he would rather drown than take a bath.
Temperance being the primary necessity, Jules Ferry, a great swallower of all things Chinese, will be an excellent subject for the scourge. [As Prime Minister, Ferry was the chief culprit in accelerating French colonial entanglements in Indochina.]
The violent exertion that Mr. Cochery is giving himself to quickly send us our despatches and letters will be fatal to him. [Cochery was Minister of Posts and Telegraphs.]
Abusing ice cream is fatal: enamelling is a lost gift. [Punning on the double meaning of “mirror.”]
How can we prevent our respectable people from smoking a lot, since, with their driving permits, they have more than six stations at their disposal?
We can say to Grévy [president of the Republic]: “Don’t lie down on the grass, he won’t want to give up his pelouze.” [Grévy was rumored to be having an affair with the wealthy socialite Marguerite Wilson-Pelouze.]
“Are you going, old beggar?”
“Yes, it’s gotten too cold.”
“Go, but take your rags!”
(Le Triboulet, Paris, 1884)
“Improved six-barreled flea-thrower with a refuting double-barreled trailer.”
Ballistic cannisters labeled “plague,” “typhus,” “cholera.”
(American Secretary of State Dean Acheson and UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie are doing the refuting.)
(Krokodil, Moscow, 1952)
“I shouldn’t drink schnapps, I shouldn’t get angry, otherwise I’ll get the cholera — but if I don’t drink schnapps, I get angry, so schnapps and cholera rather than anger and cholera.”
Peter Carl Geissler, likely 1830s. (National Library of Medicine)
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)
(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)
“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)
Canisters labeled “measles vaccine,” “yellow fever vaccine,” “dysentery vaccine,” “cholera vaccine.”
“When I’m having myself vaccinated against all diseases now, it’s a matter of life and death!”
(Kikeriki, Vienna, 1885)
A tale from Caras y caretas, Buenos Aires, 1920.
Sarrasqueta, after suffering storms and tribulations, arrives happily at the sight of Buenos Aires, eager to disembark and embrace his friends.
The passengers, who were weak from not eating on schedule, now dedicate themselves to making up for the previous fasting.
And the cramps and pains begin. The Health Department declares the ship infected with a terrible epidemic of influenza, bubonic plague, cholera, toothache, and other scourges..
The choir of doctors orders the passengers to undergo a thorough health inspection and rigorous quarantine. As if counting sheep, they first order the ladies to parade before them at great speed to check their tongues, and to be able to see a thousand an hour.
Then, at a slow trot, the first-class gentlemen and third-class men parade by the doctors. Sarrasqueta is in line with his tongue sticking out from exhaustion and pale with emotion.
The doctor, seeing him pale and with a white tongue, stops him, declaring him unclean. Sarrasqueta accedes, but claims it is from having eaten meringues for dessert.
The doctor takes his temperature. Sarrasqueta asks him not to tickle him with the thermometer, because he’ll be laughing for the whole year.
They tell him that they are going to give him a vaccine against flu, scabies, and rabies. Sarrasqueta defends himself by saying that he is neither a test body, nor a guinea pig.
They order his gothic curls to be shaved off with the clipper, perhaps so that no one takes his hair.
A public health employee arrives, not very clean, and with a fogger for killing ants he fumigates Sarrasqueta from head to toe.
They put the luggage in the disinfection oven, and they return it to him burnt to a crisp. And then they condemn him to undergo days of quarantine until they see the result of the vaccine.
Stargazer: “Damn, I see another comet there!”
(De ware Jacob, Rotterdam, 1910) (When this cartoon appeared in 1910, the last great cholera pandemic was slowly petering out. Halley’s comet also returned to earthly view that same year, an ill portent for some. In Dutch the word for body in “heavenly body” can also signal “corpse.” See also a Russian cartoon on the Halley’s comet theme.)
“Last week I was vaccinated against smallpox, today I’m going to be treated against typhus, then against cholera–“
“Are you that afraid of those diseases?”
“Oh, that’s not it. But we have a single young doctor…”
(Humoristické listy, Prague, 1915)
Robert Seymour, presumed McLeans Monthly Sheet of Caricatures, London (1831), via National Library of Medicine
Sic Transit Pestilentia 