“How old do you think I am, Gedeón?”
“You bear it on your arm. Six shots… thirty-six years old! And pardon me for saying so.”
(Gedeón, Madrid, 1909)
Mandatory vaccine
Tag: 1909
Christmas in Russia
What will I get for Christmas? A bullet, a noose, or the cholera?
(De ware Jacob, 1909)
Voilà le choléra
“Be careful not to puke from that stinkadorus, because then they’ll put you in the barracks for the cholera!”
(De ware Jacob, 1909)
Join!
Since Maura gives us that veal, we will have to increase the vaccine with faith to combat Catalan smallpox…
(Gedeón, Madrid, 1909) (Correction welcome!)
Spring vision
Pallas Athena: “Get up, get up, old man! Off to work!”
Death: “Leave me alone! I’m tired, I’m passing through Radbod and Messina… from Russia!”
(Die Glühlichter, Vienna, 1909)
Friend and ally Cholera
On the way back, they met Cholera whom Marianne [France] greeted by singing the Russian hymn. Because it was the “friend and ally” Cholera.
(L’Assiette au beurre, Paris, 1909) (Drawn at a time of close Franco-Russian diplomatic and military relations, in the midst of the last European cholera pandemic.)
The doctors of the country
The god of priests and his justice
“And now, Almighty, where must we strike!”
“As usual, wherever more people who worship me are.”
(L’Asino, Rome, 1909)
Memento mori
(St. Petersburg, 1,500,000 residents)
Cholera: “Couldn’t I reduce this number by one zero?…”
(Satirikon, St. Petersburg, 1909)
Typhus, or, everyone teaches that it’s you
Conservative Spanish politician Antonio Maura: “You see, we have also established the Attraction of Foreigners in Madrid. And as a start, we offer you this number.”
(La Campana de Gracia, Barcelona, 1909) (Idiom and context need improvement here.)
Municipal hygiene
“Yes, my dear man, I can’t do anything here, that is the rubbish hauler…”
“… and that is the communal street maintenance…”
“… and that is an officially licensed vehicle…”
“… but I would slap a fine on this slob…”
(Die Muskete, Vienna, 1909)
Russian secret police
In 1908 a typhus epidemic began spreading from the northern Caucasus and southern Russia to the more densely populated northwestern districts of the Romanov Empire. By and large the epidemic failed to reach further west in Europe, but that did not prevent the German magazine Simplicissimus from offering this curious variant of the classic trope of disease as invasive agent.
(Simplicissimus no. 24, 1909)
Sic Transit Pestilentia 