Little lady: “As soon as it’s spring, these awful newspapers will start printing things about the falling exchange rate, about cholera in France and Italy… And what for? So that you men will have an excuse to deny wives the chance to spend the summer abroad.”
(Razvlechenie, Moscow, 1885)
“What’s going on, did your husband get the plague?”
“Yes, he just got back from Serpukhov.”
“Oh, I forgot that the plague there is in the cattle.”
(Razvlechenie, Moscow, 1885)
Undertaker: “Poor thing, he’s wearing himself out. Better he should die.”
Doctor: “It’s nothing, let him get worn out! He was too stingy to pay for the visit.”
(Razvlechenie, Moscow, 1885)
(The specter in the center is labeled “Comma,” signifying the cholera vibrio.)
Upper left: Now physicians are trying to do the right thing and penetrate inside their patients in order to ascertain whether they have the comma.
Upper right: Public health workers are searching for commas in every cesspool.
(Razvlechenie, Moscow, 1885)
Lower left: The Boss: “I can’t read your documents, there are so many commas! Right now it’s not even safe.”
Lower right: Husband: “Give you money to travel abroad, and where will I get it? The comma is there, too!”
Wife: “Oh, I want to go abroad to get away from this comma, too”
(Young woman outfitted as Spain, carrying fan labeled “Koch’s comma,” a reference to the cholera vibrio. She stands in an enclosure marked “quarantine,” with onlookers Hungary, Italy, John Bull, et al.)
Everyone is interested in her now, and everyone is afraid of her.
(Razvlechenie, Moscow, 1885)
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)
“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)
Flamenco priests binge in honor of Cholera, for the work that has come to their provisioning [?].
(El Motin, Madrid, 1885)
“The Petit Journal reports the appearance of a new vine disease called black rot, which is ravaging the department of Herault.”
“Brave year. The cholera took my wife and my mother-in-law, and now the black rot threatens to rob me of the only affection that remained.”
(La Caricatura, Madrid, 1885)
“I have a chronic illness that should be included in the exemption chart.”
“Chronic?”
“Yes, sir, chronic.”
“And what?”
“Cholera morbo-asiatico.”
(Another Mecachis cartoon from La Caricatura, Madrid, 1885)
Some out of habit
others because of the cholera
some on a whim
and most for fashion,
everyone is going to bathe
in the blue waves.
Only I who do not have
not a single quarter of an hour,
I stay here by force
because they hang by force.
Stay here…? I’m already crying…!
Why? For one thing
…………………….
I’m afraid to be
alone with the microbe
(La Caricatura, Madrid, 1885) (Sadly I cannot say anything about Nao Ping. This one is rich with possibility.)
Gabriel Liquier penned cartoons under the aliases Trick and Trock for La Caricature in Paris. Around the time that cholera was peaking again in France in 1884, some of his miscellaneous drawings touched on the epidemic, and we shall collect them together here. (As usual, links to sources are embedded in the images.)
“Where are you going so quickly, Calino?”
“I am taking precautions against cholera: I’m off to buy a cordon sanitaire.”
“My little choleric, be very nice: don’t die without telling me if it’s Asian cholera or our cholera!”
“Are you suffering from sciatica? Oh, my poor sir, that is a symptom of cholera…”
“Not possible!”
“It’s a sciatic cholera.” (“Asiatic”)
(The same pun was recycled in 1892 in Le Journal amusant.)
“What is this note, madame?… What am I looking at! An appointment granted to a photographer!”
“But, my love, when you have cholera, how will I cure you with collodion if I don’t learn photography?”
“So, Mr. Guibollard, do they think the cholera microbe has been found?”
“Perfectly. It’s a certain comma microbe… I’m so sure of it that I no longer put punctuation in what I write!”
“The cholera from here is nothing, madame! But with us, everyone flees.”
“Yet you have only had one death…”
“That is true…, but it is that of the mayor!”
“A fire at the Porno-Naturalist Library.”
“In this time of cholera, it may be a sanitation measure.”
“Since the closing of my theater I have been looking for a remedy against cholera…. and I haven’t found it!”
“This poor director! He will never get his hands on a good formula!”
“So don’t be nervous, Mr. Fouinard: the Pyrenees will serve as a barrier against Spanish cholera.”
“Precisely… I let myself be told that someone would have said that there were no more Pyrenees!”
Wow, Sr. Manuel! I would also relax in my rocking chair if I was in France, giving grand advice about cholera!
(La Esquella de la torratxa, Barcelona, 1885)
And us here, between the sun that melts us and the cholera that surrounds us.
Mr. Cholera Morbus travels about Barcelona determined to work mischief. Detail from a multi-panel cartoon.
(La Esquella de la torratxa, Barcelona, 1885)
Sic Transit Pestilentia 