Cholera symphony

Grand ball of melons and watermelons, organized in honor of cholera, for having saved their lives with his coming.
(La Esquella de la torratxa, Barcelona, 1885)

Sanitary precautions against cholera

(La Esquella de la torratxa, Barcelona, 1885)

Don’t be overly fearful.

Don’t have excess confidence.

Maintain the same hours of eating and working as always.

Since you get more cholera when it’s quiet at night, the quiet ones will go out during the day. (?)

Don’t eat much!

And don’t eat too much.

And most importantly, don’t eat melons, watermelons, or tomatoes.

Barcelona and the goose

Ala, ala: it’s time to go for the club!… It is enough that we have cholera all year round, in the square, at the fishmongers, in the slaughterhouse, in the taverns, in the bakeries, in the grocery stores, and at the tobacconists. Well, enough, in the name of the God of microbes!
(La Esquella de la torratxa, Barcelona, 1885)

One warning more!

Scene: Mud-salad market. (Cholera lurking in the miasmatic background)
Mr. Punch (Inspector of Nuisances): “Now, then, my noble stick-in-the-mud, I’ve told you to clear up this place long ago, wake up, or it will be too late!”
(Punch, London, 1885)

Comical cholera

(left) “Listen, are these cigars from Valencia?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are they already vaccinated?”
(right, where sign indicates that inoculation is only available to unmarried single men and widows: married people are forbidden): “Look what trouble it is to be married! You, has it come out in Romero Robledo [Spanish Interior Minister] that married men cannot vaccinate cholera.” [I’ve got this idiom wrong, but you get the idea…]
(La Esquella de la torratxa, Barcelona, 1885)

Social misery transcended

A physician injecting small quantities of meat extract: “Since we can now inoculate away via its own poison, not only smallpox, but also cholera, typhus, consumption, brain inflammation, in short, all bad diseases, we simply proceed in the same manner with hunger, thirst, and lack of money, inoculate it away via the corresponding medium and — who would deny it? — the social question is solved.”
(Nebelspalter, Zurich, 1885)