Subtitled “On the vaccination debate.” Three quacks: “Listen, boy, there’s no other way! You have to get inoculated either against the black or the blue or the red pox.” It would be an interesting comparative exercise to study when vaccination is sufficiently widespread that it can be appropriated as a readily understood political metaphor (black conservative, blue centrist, and red social democratic, respectively).
(Kladderadatsch, Germany, 1914)
“Here is the cause of typhus!!! Beat the louse! Kill the louse or you will die.”
Soviet public health poster, c. 1920.
(Russian State Library)
Mars (to the Spanish flu): “Beginner!”
(Nebelspalter, Zurich, 1918)
Cholera (to capitalism and militarism, seated on the proletariat): “Were you to grant my request, I would be the third in your alliance.”
(Die Glühlichter, Vienna, 1893)
“Cholera has already taken up residence with us and her bony army of death threatens factories and plants, it threatens the army. To arms! Get vaccinated! The enemy does not wait!” (Ekaterinodar, 1920) (Russian State Library)
Clerk: “What do you want?”
Orientalized crone: “To register.”
“What have you done to that end?”
“Nothing else! I’m just Malaria and it does say in the newspapers that the Bundesrat has decided to extend the change-of-residence obligation to Malaria, too!”
“What is your first name? How old are you? Are you married? Vaccinated? Divorced? You have to fill out everything here; then we’ll see!”
(Nebelspalter, Zurich, 1919)
Doctor: “Well, Herr Councillor, you have returned from your business trip quite corpulent, you’ve bounced back from cholera quite well and are making improvements to your diet!”
Councillor: “That’s just it. Herr Doctor told me: ‘Only diet! Only diet!’ and right away I followed it strictly in the plural!”
(Fliegende Blätter, Munich, 1855)
There was no immunity from tortuous puns during the great influenza pandemic.
“It seems a man was found dead; he was clutching at the espagnolette (window fastening) of his window.”
“No doubt about it: it was the Spanish flu.”
(Le Pêle-mêle, Paris, 1919)
“Wonderful solitude! Now if I just had my old boss here — without witnesses!”
(Fliegende Blätter, Munich, 1935)
OK, it’s off topic, but I dare say physical distancing fosters many off-kilter fantasies.
As always in matters of hygiene, delicate questions of class are lurking in the foreground. I can’t pretend to translate Schweizerdeutsch properly, but the basic sentiment of the fellow clearing his nose seems to be that he’s always said that their hygienic nose-clearing is the best means against the spread of Spanish flu. Clearly the good bourgeois passers-by feel differently.
(Nebelspalter, Zurich, 1918)
“Look, Moritz is spitting in the sea.”
“So where is he supposed to spit if it’s forbidden everywhere?”
(Die Muskete, Vienna, 1907)
During flu outbreaks working in masks is recommended. (Soviet Union, 1963)
(State Museum of St. Petersburg History, with thanks to Svetlana Lazutina)
The siege artillery is intended to evacuate the fortresses and to operate on the rear of the enemy. (The general is mounted on a clystère or syringe suitable for enemas, which turns out to be a recurrent theme of contemporary French political satire.)
(La Caricature, Paris, 1831.) (See also this version from 1833.) (This British print from 1800-1805 is the earliest Anglophone satirical invocation I’ve found of the disgust which this mechanism could induce.)
The earliest French clystère cartoon I’ve found is entitled “Trendy physician, or the colic of those medical gentlemen who have seen their urine and said that they are very sick.” (via Gallica, 1784)
The police in Sommermoll tolerate no unripe fruit at the market; these are immediately thrown away, so that they can do no harm.
Nebelspalter, Zurich, 1892.
Mars negotiates the breakup of Ottoman Turkey with Cholera, seated on a barrel of carbolic acid. Peace the Diplomat approaches the table.
Diplomat: “But you’ve already divided up everything.”
Turk (perched on German Pickelhaube): “Well now I understand what the friendly support of Germany means!”
Russian satirical magazine Ogonek no. 49, 1910.
Sic Transit Pestilentia 