(Patients with different epidemic diseases are being treated together at the St. Sebastian hospital.)
Plague: “Well, goodbye! It doesn’t matter if you die from large pox or small ones!
Typhus: “The same, I say! It all comes down to cooling the roof of the mouth!”
Smallpox: “Very well! It’s the press that got their berries back in the basket!” (Better idiom needed!)
“Let’s go! Let’s dance the cake-walk of mixing!”
(O Malho, Rio de Janeiro, 1908)
A cartoon set in the year of the Brazilian National Exposition in 1908: “We’re toast, my dear, we are toast! We have drought and famine, parade floats, smallpox, Exposition parties, bubonic plague, propagandists of Brazil, and now here comes cholera!”
“What do you want? Disasters always come in multiples… But the worst of it all is that I don’t see men capable of curbing these ills, despite the [manioc] flour of erudition with which they are stuffed… because of the leaves.” (Meaning that appearance prevailed over substance?)
(O Malho, Rio de Janeiro, 1908)
“They are assembling together…” Purishkevich (to cholera while beating it with his umbrella): “It might be failing right now, we’ll have more ways to entertain the public.” (Purishkevich was an ultraconservative and anti-Semitic Russian politician who had recently fallen out with one set of protofascist allies and was cultivating a new group under the name “Russian People’s Union of the Archangel Michael.” Presumably Satirikon regarded neither Purishkevich nor cholera as good for the health of the Russian body politic.)
(Satirikon, St. Petersburg, 1908)
Summer visits — the Asian guest. Cover image of the Russian satirical magazine Satirikon as cholera in the southern provinces of the empire was making itself felt more widely.
(Satirikon, St. Petersburg, 1908)
This image of death on wheels is a bit ambiguous for our purposes, but it was published just at the moment when a cholera epidemic in the Caucasus was reaching the Russian capital, so I shall classify it accordingly.
(Satirikon, St. Petersburg, 1908)
Spanish fly, a great new medical victory in Finland.
Herbalists (watching the Morbus hispanicus bacilli just flown in from the Old Clinic): They could be anything else, but not smallpox.
Among the figures depicted, Richard Sievers was a Finnish-Swedish physician with German roots who was credited with sparing Finland from the cholera epidemic then developing in Russia.
(Tuulispää, Helsinki, 1908)
or strict diet as it would be easy to maintain these days.
(Reprinted in Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, 1908; originally 1830s.) (Cf. copy at National Library of Medicine) (And see the female counterpart.) The artist is apparently Peter Carl Geissler.
Spitting is not permitted!
Cooking asphalt! Demolishing houses!
Beating carpets! Driving a car!
Dragging a train! Chimney cleaning!
Street sweeping! Barrel carting!
Dust! Fumes! Pestilence! Bacteria!
Rust! Microbes! Smoking at the break!
Loading coal! Carting away manure!
But — spitting is not permitted!
(Fliegende Blätter, Munich, 1908)
File under “Lo, how the mighty have fallen,” a poster c. 1908 depicting imprisoned pashas attacked by cholera, likely in the wake of the Young Turk revolution. Let us hope the Turkish descendent in Downing Street recovers quickly from both the virus and his epidemiological foolishness.
(Digital National Museum in Warsaw)
“Fear each other, fight each other as you like, party leaders! I will reconcile all of you as an independent!”
(Polish satirical magazine Mucha, Warsaw, 1908)
Finnish satirical magazine Tuulispää, 1908. Note the timely fieldwork by the dedicated bacteriologist.
Sic Transit Pestilentia 