Disinfectant

“It’s true in comparison to that smell, nothing smells worse!”
(Le Charivari, Paris, 1849)

Carnival and Lent

(This is not a freestanding cartoon, but one of several small illustrations that accompany an essay by this title. A rather rough translation of a bit of the surrounding text follows. I’m including this item because it is the earliest available Spanish example I have located so far.)

The recent carnival in Madrid has been bountiful in amorous intrigues, very weighty puns, and acts of honor.

As if revolutions, wars, typhus, influenza, morbid cholera, national pneumonia, and doctors who take death as their lackey were not enough, there are men who have such little esteem for their lives, that I must get away from all that chaff pretending to be skewered like veal on a spit. This would be dreadful if, fortunately, there were not charitable souls in the world who would try to convert the fiery impetus of the Matachines [carnivalesque dance troupes] into healthy prudence… [A metaphor or Aesopian tag for revolutionary factions, which did not win the day in 1848? I am out of my depth here.]
(La Linterna mágica, Madrid, 1849)

Report from Africa

“Ah! There you are, my husband!… What do you bring me from Africa, my darling?”
“I’m bringing you a dysentery and an ophthalmia…”
(Le Charivari, Paris, 1849)

Manners and customs of ye Englyshe in 1849

An amusing illustration in light of our present concerns about physical distancing. But the more so in view of its intentional juxtaposition on the same page with an entry in “Mr. Pips his Diary.” Punch‘s Pepys relates a conversation with a physician on a crowded train in which said physician complains of “the Foulness of London for Want of fit Drainage, and how it do breed Cholera and Typhus, as sure as rotten Cheese do Mites, and of the horrid Folly of making a great Gutter of the River.” Truly, “the Bustle of Railways do destroy all the Dignity of Travelling.”
(Punch, London, 1849)

There are some similarities in this German cartoon from Kladderadatsch (1889).

Mistaking cause for effect

Boy: “I say, Tommy, I’m blow’d if there isn’t a man a turning on the cholera.”
(Punch, London, 1849)