Abstract
On Tuesday 2 July 1832, Susan Warner, a 12-year-old in Brooklyn, wrote in her journal, ‘The Cholera is in New York; Father told us so last night. I do not feel much afraid.’1 Her offhand comment underplays the epidemic’s impact, both for New Yorkers of her time and for twentieth-century historiography. The city’s newspapers did not share her sanguinity: as the menace moved south from Quebec, the headlines read like montages in horror films as a monster crept toward the metropolis.2 In the fast-growing city, the threat of Asiatic cholera provided a flashpoint for every sort of social anxiety, producing discourses involving class and industrialization, religion and secularism, immigration and political unrest, physicality and sexuality, and not least the power of language in an already media-conscious city.
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Notes
Susan Warner, journals, Constitution Island Association Archives, West Point, New York.
Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: the United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962 and 1987) 55–64.
David T. Z. Mindich, Just the Facts: How ‘Objectivity’ Came to Define American Journalism (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 95–112. See also Norman Longmate, King Cholera: the Biography of a Disease (London: Hanish Hamilton, 1966), R. J. Morris, Cholera 1832: the Social Response to an Epidemic (London: Croom Helm, 1976), Margaret Pelling, Cholera, Fever, and English Medicine (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), and Geoffrey Bilson, A Darkened House: Cholera in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). On the reception of cholera in London, and the troubles invovled in distinguishing between ‘imported’ Asiatic cholera and ‘domestic’ cholera morbus, see George S. Rousseau and David Boyd Haycock, ‘Coleridge’s Choleras: Cholera Morbus, Asiatic Cholera and Dysentery in Nineteenth-Century England’, The Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77 (2003): 298–331.
John Duffy, A History of Public Health in New York City (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1974).
James L. Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1989) 11.
Hyder Ally [sic], ‘Report of the Committee on Cholera’, Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, 27 June 1832: 2.
Paul F. Eve, New-York Whig, 11 January 1832: 2.
Nathan 0. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 133–41.
E. P. Throop, ‘Correspondence’, New-York Whig, 4 July 1832: 3.
Howard Markel, ‘Cholera’, in The Encyclopedia of New York City, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 219.
Nathan Kantrowitz, ‘Population’, in ibid., 923.
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1850 (1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963) 287.
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© 2003 George Rousseau, Miranda Gill, David B. Haycock and Malte Herwig
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Weiss, J. (2003). ‘This Pestilence Which Walketh in Darkness’: Reconceptualizing the 1832 New York Cholera Epidemic. In: Rousseau, G.S., Gill, M., Haycock, D., Herwig, M. (eds) Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524323_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524323_4
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