Open your store!

Why don’t they?

Getting the measles

Passing quarantine grounds

Affected Swell: “Aw–I say–Mr. Jones–did you evah see the horwid small pawks?”
Jones (funny man): “Oh! Yes–had one for dinner on Sunday–sucking pigs, you know, we call’ em.”
(Swell collapses)
(Sydney Punch, 1881)

The smallpox scare

How it originated in Sydney.
A story of putridoxcinnation.
(Truth, Brisbane, 1913) (Follow the link for the extended verses that accompany this; I include a couple below.)

In our Southern clime, in a healthy time, when trade was slack with the coffin-makers,
When the hearses’ teams chewed their oats in dreams, and a lifeless trade was the undertakers’,
Came a grisly pair labeled ‘Death’ and ‘Scare’–for the visit the last bedmakers thanked ’em–
And settled them down for a time in town, in a crazy Sydney doctor’s sanctum.
……….
What was left of the scare was a small affair not calling for further consideration–
There was no smallpox. IT WAS PUTRID OX that menaced Old Sydney with decimation.

Hard luck

Smith’s Weekly, Sydney, 1919

A rebate desired

(Western Mail, Perth, 1913)
(Compare this German version)

Sanitary reform

“The time has arrived when drastic steps should be taken by the Council to remove a number of the dilapidated structures which exist.”
Health Board (to slum landlord as Typhoid lurks in the background): My methods are not nice, but neither is the company you keep.
(Western Mail, Perth, 1907)

That boat!

In 1881 Sydney, Australia, suffered a smallpox epidemic whose earliest infections likely stemmed from China, with the authorities once again resorting to strict quarantine. In this cartoon the nervousness about harbor connections to ships quarantined offshore invited a play on a Gilbert & Sullivan ditty.
(Sydney Punch, 1881)

Quarantine

How the dodge is worked: And how it is being fought.
(Truth, Sydney, 1913) (During a smallpox scare, compulsory vaccination seems to have aroused considerable opposition, including the sentiment that it constituted “a gross and filthy idolatry, an arrogant superstition, a giant delusion, deified as scientific by the medical fraternity.”)

The runaway

Acting Prime Minister Watt speaks of the assumption that the disease now in Australia is the dreaded type that ravaged half the world. He assures us that “the evidence in this direction is by no means conclusive.”
Casual Willy Watt: “Let her rip!”
(Western Mail, Perth, 1919) (Sign between skull and cowcatcher reads “Influenza.”)

Quarantined

Young John Scattercash (who has been on board the “Brisbane”) is run to earth at a grand supper, given in celebration of his sister’s wedding, and taken off to quarantine.
(Sydney Punch, 1877)
(When Sir Arthur Kennedy, newly appointed as governor of Queensland, arrived on the steamer Brisbane from Hong Kong in March 1877, a “Chinaman” on board was found to be infected with smallpox. The ship and its hundreds of Chinese passengers were held in quarantine in Moreton Bay, but the political authorities dithered about whether Kennedy and his entourage should be exempted. A special medical commission was created to adjudicate, but this was widely dismissed as merely buying time to downplay a potentially unpopular decision that would be, at root, political. “The people of Australia are looked upon in England as being a trifle too democratic, as inclined to pay too little respect to high rank or exalted dignity,” proclaimed The Brisbane Courier. “It is reserved for the Imperial authorities to lower the state which has always been accorded to the Governor of Queensland, by sending us one, traveling to assume his Government, as a passenger on a merchant steamer crowded with hundreds of Chinese coolies… We have, however, a decided right to object to any relaxation of the precautions usually deemed necessary to prevent the landing of smallpox on our shores.” According to Krista Maglen, Australia favored quarantine as a tool of disease prevention well after Britain had abandoned this tactic, and not only for reasons of geographical isolation. This image makes clear the strong resonances with questions of class which quarantine also excited.)