“What a marvelous thing! Three young Hungarian medical scientists have discovered a new bacterium! The famine-typhus bacterium!”
“How can you be happy about this!? Aren’t there already enough bacteria!?”
(Kakas Marton, Budapest, 1908)
At the epidemic butcher: “I’ll take half a portion of smallpox microbes.”
At the drugstore: “You would like typhus microbes? We don’t have fresh ones in the afternoon.”
(La Esquelle de la torratxa, Barcelona, 1894)
“Some fresh water, Mr. Bartl.”
“Not yet. First I need to look in the newspaper to see how things stand with the typhus.”
(Figaro, Vienna, 1889)
Typhus (to musician singing “Neutrality”): “You see, with your mouth open, germs can’t get in.”
(La Estrella de la torratxa, Barcelona, 1917)
Once it was established that the abdominal typhus has broken out, the pumping station at Schwarza was immediately locked down.
(Kikeriki, Vienna, 1889)
“Ignacio, all six of them are sick with scarlet fever, flu, smallpox, whooping cough, typhus, and choler!”
“Don’t be scared, “girl,” go and “call” the doctor. For six he’ll make a discount, but ask for a prescription just for everyone and the discount that the pharmacist promised.”
(O Malho, Rio de Janeiro, 1927)
(Wife waiting for husband?) “It’s been half an hour since they’ve been chatting next to a beer garden… Let’s see if I can catch typhus!…”
(La Esquella de la torratxa, Barcelona, 1914)
A sprinkling of disinfectant in each sewer, and we already have the city clean and purified like a dinner plate.
(La Esquella de la torratxa, Barcelona, 1900)
Emaciated Pole: “You may be a Bolshevik, but you are a good man. You are taking me to Poland on your own back.”
Bolshevik: “Got it backwards, fool! I’m not carrying you, brother, but your typhoid fever, so that you will spread it to the glory of Soviet power in Poland.”
(Mucha, Warsaw, 1922)
First two panels:
(Image of a plate of Carioca dust [flour] with typhus, tuberculosis, yellow fever, smallpox, plague, gastroenteritis, etc. “Carioca” is a way of referring to the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro.)
“We knew the dust of Persia, we knew gold dust, monkey dust and Joanna dust, the river Po [“pó” meaning dust], etc., but… we are completely unaware of this new dust that invades us, suffocates us, and that kills us: the dust from Rio de Janeiro.”
Deathly figure: “Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return…”
“We know perfectly well that we are dust and that we shall become dust, but that does not mean that we have to feed on dust while we are alive…”
(and four more panels of quirky municipal politics…)
(O Malho, Rio de Janeiro, 1911)
(Smallpox, typhus, and measles are still among us, which have been full of pleasantries.) (?)
Marcolino: “Dr. Carlos Chagas [discoverer of the eponymous disease, AKA trypanosomiasis] shouldn’t be going to Europe now.”
Mr. Mosquito: “And; the sanitary state of the city demands his presence and a lot of work.”
“I’m not lacking for that. And in Europe, the ship on which he travels can be “interdicted”…”
(O Malho, Rio de Janeiro, 1926) (This translation clearly wants improvement.)
Typhus: “What does one more corpse matter to the world!” (Major theaters closed as typhus knifes a harlequin in the back.)
(La Esquella de torratxa, Barcelona, 1914)
(Patients with different epidemic diseases are being treated together at the St. Sebastian hospital.)
Plague: “Well, goodbye! It doesn’t matter if you die from large pox or small ones!
Typhus: “The same, I say! It all comes down to cooling the roof of the mouth!”
Smallpox: “Very well! It’s the press that got their berries back in the basket!” (Better idiom needed!)
“Let’s go! Let’s dance the cake-walk of mixing!”
(O Malho, Rio de Janeiro, 1908)
Dr. Oswaldo Cruz [Brazil’s pioneering bacteriologist, who had recently left the public health service]: “Hello! … I already dealt with you in the war…”
The Typhus: “Whaddaya mean, doc! After you left the Hygiene Department, sir, I was no longer the master of leaving Rio de Janeiro!
I’ve been working for the donkey… Now I’m operating at the Botanical Garden; but I still have a lot to do in other neighborhoods! …”
(O Malho, Rio de Janeiro, 1916) (I surely require correction with the idioms here.)
“If you don’t listen to my advice, you will never get over typhus…”
“Doctor, I don’t want to get over typhus, just for typhus to get over me.”
(Mucha, Warsaw, 1891)
Sic Transit Pestilentia 