The discovery of vaccine

From Champfleury’s Histoire de la caricature sous la République, l’Empire et la Restauration (Paris, 1877). Any revolution unfortunately generates excess, any excess is paid for by steps backward. It has been so since the beginning of humanity and it will always be the same, the Progress or Decadence of nations being exercised only imperceptibly and via slow permeations. That a people erect a pyramid at the top of which it engraves the main facts of its history, that a crevasse opens revealing the abyss at the bottom of which a nation is condemned to expiate its faults, long years will pass before the last stone of the commemorative monument is laid, before the collapse in which men and things must disappear.

Many volumes have been written on this theme and had the title page adorned with solemn gentlemen thinkers gaunt as wineskins. The author [Champfleury], predisposed by his studies to fear mockery, considers it appropriate to leave aside the grandeur of the decline of empires as well as banal historical forecasts. His more modest role consists in seeking what futile repercussions sometimes lead to serious events. So one could, according to him, draw a picture of satirical ephemerides relating to important discoveries, to the benefits that humanity accepts only with a mocking smile.

In this order, the century opens with the discovery of vaccine. As soon as Jenner’s name is mentioned, the cartoon catches your eye. “Were the discovery of vaccine,” said Cuvier in a report to the Institut de France, “to be the only thing that medicine had obtained in the present period, it would suffice to forever illustrate our era in the history of science.” But just as there are mockingbirds which parody the song of the nightingale, so also people who practice mockery never lose their rights. They are useful, moreover, helping to popularize a discovery, although their pencil is not cut out for this purpose The discovery of vaccine was therefore set upon by cartoonists, without giving them a strong inspiration.

The flu

“This is too much! Most of the tenants have a bit of a fever, so the building supervisor says she’s shutting off the central heating.”
(Ric et Rac, Paris, 1933)

The microbes that make our living

(Pharmacist) “With their bloody new neighborhoods that they’re building everywhere, they are destroying the microbes that make our living…”
(L’Assiette au beurre, Paris, 1903)

The pharmacist

“Ah! bah! we still notice the error fairly quickly… If the customer dies, for example…”
(L’Assiette au beurre, Paris, 1903)

Charitable souls!

“Well! let’s see, and at your place, how’s it going with you, cutie?”
“Not too bad, not too bad; lots of colds; a bit of bronchitis, some smallpox… But, as papa was saying to me yesterday, for everything to go altogether, entirely well, we would need… a good little epidemic.”
(Le Journal amusant, Paris, 1872)

One victory is worth another

(A large clystère cannon is being loaded with various disinfectants by Prussians.)
Our enemies’ damp-room artillery guards us from the cholera of our friends.
(Le Rire, Paris, 1908)

Smallpox

A wealthy but incapacitated old man whose depiction is more edifying than amusing, as impressionable young children are led away from the brutal scarring of smallpox. Note the young lackey poised to lance the pustules. Excerpt from an accompanying text: “Strike the face! is also the battle cry of smallpox: the nose, the mouth, and the eyes are found by it as if cast into a mold, and one hardly cares to run the chance of a revision, the results of which are so clearly planned. It is true that if the smallpox comes to deprive you of an eye, to make you deaf in an ear, it will take care to enlarge your nose, to thicken your lips, to enlarge your mouth, and thus establish a balance between profits and losses.”
(Charles Aubry et al., Album comique de pathologie pittoresque, recueil de vingt caricatures médicales, Paris, 1823, via Wellcome Collection)

Parisian sketches

“This little rosebush that you gave me this winter, it nicely reminded me of you when you had smallpox.”
“Ah! that’s sweet!”
“Yes, because of the buds!” [a synonym for pimples]
(Le Journal amusant, Paris, 1871)

Parisian scene

“Ah! what a year! what a year! The foreign invasion, the civil war, the smallpox, the rinderpest!”
“And with all that, my spinach which did not want to go to seed!”
(Le Journal amusant, Paris, 1871)

With best wishes

“Here you go, my dear, oysters from the doctor, with best wishes for a good… typhoid fever.”
(Le Rire, Paris, 1903)

The theater of morals

A tempera painting workshop
A remarkably beautiful young girl, wishing to take shelter from seducers, comes to beg a young assistant to paint her face with frightful marks of smallpox. [“Rapin” is richer with meaning than “assistant,” and designates a painter without talent, but possessing bohemian allure.]
(Le Journal amusant, Paris, 1874)

What they say in the funeral procession

“As if it wasn’t disgusting… Burying this man who died of small pox next to my late husband, who never had it!”
(La Caricature, Paris, 1902) (A German cartoon in a similar vein.)

You might have cholera!

“I’m coming from St. Petersburg Street [in Paris]!…”
“You will not enter: you might have cholera!”
(Le Rire, Paris, 1908)

Smoking hot

“Ah! this cholera, how many precautions must be taken to protect yourself from it: everything you take must be very hot!”
“Oh! with me, nothing to fear… I’m smoking hot!”
(Le Rire, Paris, 1908)

The flu

Contagious disease exerting its fury on Parisians in 1831.
(La Caricature, Paris, 1831)