Bacteriological station

“Bac… ter… e… o… o… station. Eh…eh!!! Let’s go inside, Vasya, and have a drink!”
(Shut, St. Petersburg, 1893)

Shrieking microbes

“Tell me, doctor, why does water make noise when falling into fire?”
“Microbes that shriek when burned!”
(Buen Humor, Madrid, 1925)

What seemed nothing to you in war may seem terrible to you in peacetime

(Le Régiment, Paris, 1919)

We could very well have taken hill 304… but not be able to take the Metro.

One may have resisted Kraut attacks… …but not resist French attacks.

There are the exploding bombs we escape… We are killed by certain explosions… of endearment.

With a mask we are not afraid of noxious gases. Without a mask, they are more annoying…

It didn’t work

“My son was also vaccinated today. Do you think it will be of any use?”
“Is it useful? What else, I say! Our Jonah was vaccinated yesterday and today he fell down the stairs and broke the very arm that had been vaccinated.”
(Tuulispää, Helsinki, 1931)

An idea for Dr. Oswaldo Cruz

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…

Things that don’t exist

“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)

Cause and effect

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)

Epochal invention

A multi-panel cartoon by Karel Stroff from Humoristické listy (Prague, 1915), drawn at a time during World War I when cities were beginning to experience food shortages, and producers were frequently suspected of overcharging for ersatz materials unsuited for human consumption.

The famous Professor Mikrobec pondered: So many diseases can be averted by vaccination, and one of the most terrible is raging in today’s war. I have to find a serum against it.

2. At the “qualified authorities”: Rest assured, gentlemen, that my invention will not disappoint. We can start tomorrow.

3. It’s nothing, sir, vaccination is healthy. There are so many diseases today…

4. For Christ’s sake, old man, what are you doing? Throw away all the crumbs in the morning, and now make buns like there’s no tomorrow… Are you crazy?
I’m not crazy, but that’s the way it is, that’s the right and honest thing…

5. People cheered on this miracle–

6. (Signs reading “Glory to the most useful scientist!!” and “Long live the inventor of the serum against extortion!!”)
and the grateful nation demanded enthusiastic applause for the professor.

In the field of mandatory vaccine

Joe Public’s attitude as imagined by Mr. Oswaldo Costas Quentes, in view of the geniality of his German regulation… [Biologist and public health official Oswaldo Cruz is at the head of the spear pressing at the breast of Joe Public.]

Joe Public’s actual attitude
Now please don’t toy with me! I don’t want to know about politics! I won’t have any instigators and I’m not scared of your antics!
(O Malho, Rio de Janeiro, 1904) (On the complicated politics of obligatory vaccination in Brazil, see also this cartoon.)

At Professor Carrel’s lab

(Early in 1911 the French-American medical researcher Alexis Carrel, then working at Rockefeller University, drew attention in The New York Times for having “succeeded in stimulating the growth of animal tissues outside the body” and “caus[ing] cancer tissues to grow after removal from the human body.” The bearded professor depicted here bears little resemblance to the clean-shaven Carrel, who would soon win the Nobel Prize for Medicine for other work. But the Polish cartoonist in Russian-ruled Warsaw somehow managed to find inspiration for a political jab, so to speak, at his oppressors.)
“Professor, apparently you make excellent vaccines [sic] for the human body? Wouldn’t you be able to graft twenty hands onto me?” [a strange pun, since rąk can also mean cancer; the word for “graft” can also mean “inoculate”]
“Are you a musical artist?”
“No, Professor. I am the Russian quartermaster.”
(Mucha, Warsaw, 1911)

Are you that afraid of those diseases?

“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)

There’s no harm in experimenting

(The Brazilian League Against Tuberculosis, using the discovery of Calmette and Guérin [a French vaccine first introduced in 1921], will save newborn babies from the white plague.)
Joachim Francisco de Assis Brasil (Brazilian politician who had played an important role in securing Amazonian borderlands to the Republic) and Francisco Antônio de Almeida Morato (Brazilian politician and founding figure of the Democratic Party this same year): “We bring you here the National Party in order to be protected against near or future consumption [TB].”
Miguel Couto (Brazilian physician and politician) and Ataulfo de Paiva (magistrate, elite networker, and apparently at one point a figurehead in the Brazilian Academy of Sciences): “There’s no harm in experimenting. But if the disease is born, there will be no vaccine to cure it…”
(O Malho, Rio de Janeiro, 1927)

The political vaccination metaphor was not new to O Malho: see this example from 1904.

Nearly, nearly, farce

The angel of death on public transportation.
(Buen Humor, Madrid, 1922)

But every day I remove them

“This disease in the boy’s hair is due to bacteria…”
“But every day I remove them and kill them.”
(Tuulispää, Helsinki, 1923)

How the street-cleaning authorities in New York guard against summer epidemics

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)