“The plague take all the Englanders!” cried Uncle Krüger before fleeing.
“I already have!” said the plague, pouncing on Glasgow.
(Lustige Blätter, Berlin, 1900)
(Paul Kruger was the president of the South African Republic during the Boer War against the British. Glasgow was suffering from a small outbreak of plague at the time.)
Death loves a shining mark.
(Puck, New York, 1900)
(La Revista da semana, Rio de Janeiro, 1900) (While I can’t capture the idiom, the point of the cartoon is clear. There are similar flu-related cartoons in Czech and Hungarian versions.)
The first creditor appears on the stairs,…
Another comes up, and another…
…yet another,… finally dozens
They knock on Casusa’s door, “a bloody fresh band at dawn.”
Casusa arrives at the door, burning in [illegible]. And he says to the people in a very stern tone, “I have bubonic plague around the house.”
“Plague?! Jesus! We’ve got to leave now!!”
“This year we have over 60 doctors in medicine…”
“Oh my! We will have bubonic plague for a long time.”
(Revista da Semana, Rio de Janeiro, 1900)
At the salon of Counselor Mumia:
The poet Gadelha, after many requests, will recite a poem of his own (free!).
In the second stanza, with tremors in her voice, she would gargle at him:
“I escaped the black ISOLATION.”
“Isolation?!” (General stampede)
(Revista da Semana, Rio de Janeiro, 1900)
“How is father?”
“Not great, his hand hurts.”
“And Mom?”
“Really bad, her leg hurts.”
“At least you are well?”
“Oh, no, and something hurts. Because you see, our whole family got vaccinated for smallpox, it’s just that it was every person in a different place on the body.”
(Mucha, Warsaw, 1900)
(The Vigszinház or Comedy Theater was generally the most popular in Budapest.)
The pitchfork at the city outskirts —
Even chorela doesn’t come in!
(The orthography signals something other than high diction. Note the phonetic metathesis of “cholera.” Contemporaries would have understood the reference to a folksong lamenting that cholera didn’t affect lords or priests, only the poor peasants.)
(Borsszem Jankó, Budapest, 1900)
Physician: “Keep in mind that the influenza is itself not so bad, but it can have very unpleasant aftereffects.”
Patient: “I noticed that when I got your bill, Doctor!”
(Humor/Neues Wiener Journal, Vienna, 1900)
A nearly identical cartoon in Der Floh, Vienna, 1899:
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)
Sic Transit Pestilentia 