Fearing future epidemics: the cholera crisis of 1892

Events overtake ideas: dying in the time of denial

To work towards my definition of crisis, I want to eliminate terms such as emergency, disaster, and catastrophe, as they don’t accurately reflect Toronto’s experience with cholera in 1892. ⁷ Since no one lost his or her life or suffered cholera, to frame this event with words like catastrophe is careless and distorts what took place. What then is the difference between a disaster event and a crisis? To be pedantic in formulating a general definition, I’d like to think through a range of disease events, from the perspective of a doctor or health expert. The first version of a disease event could simply be a situation where people die. A second version could be a situation where people get sick, and that includes instances when the cholera bacterium was found. In a more nuanced version, a medical expert looks back to past disease events and demarcates what was or was not an outbreak. This declaration of outbreak would be dependent on the fluctuations of death and sickness numbers during a bounded period, and that period would then be judged in comparison to other periods. This would distinguish the presence of cholera from the severity of cholera’s effects—cholera as an affliction versus cholera as an epidemic. However, Toronto in 1892 does not fit any of these typologies of a disease event. In Toronto, no one died of cholera, no bacterium was found, and no upsurge of sickness took place; there was no emergency. Despite this, the cholera pandemic caused activity in Toronto—indeed, throughout the world. To tackle the understanding of this event of 1892, Hamburg needs to be investigated, but not because this is where pandemic ‘started,’ rather, Hamburg is where cholera gained the force and intensity to become an emergency.

By August of 1892, Toronto’s newspapers, as well as news outlets around the Atlantic, were regularly reporting cholera outbreaks occurring in far off and foreign locales. For over sixty years, North American audiences had read updates and notices on the spread of cholera throughout the world. These outbreak events appeared to be increasing in frequency and were encroaching on western European cities. However, some reports dismissed these fears, suggesting the notices were false alarms—only diarrhea or ‘cholera infantum.’ Then, at the end of August, international attention was focused on the city of Hamburg, Germany. Port authorities in neighboring countries suspected for some time that Hamburg was in the middle of a serious cholera emergency. However, Hamburg’s city government publicly denied the outbreak. The city government tried to quell the fear and rationalized that, even if cholera was present, every precaution was being taken to keep the disease local.

There were doubts the disease could be contained, since Hamburg was one of the largest and busiest ports in the world. North America was particularly worried. New York and Hamburg had the highest volume of shipping between any two ports of that period. Hamburg’s direct shipping connections to Montreal worried Canadians. While Hamburg city officials denied cholera, the growing death count could not be ignored.

The cholera outbreak was confirmed in Hamburg when the famed German bacteriological scientist Robert Koch, the scientist who ‘discovered’ the cholera bacterium in 1882, rushed back from Persia where he was doing research and declared he had found cholera in the German city’s water supply. The Toronto Evening News reported, ‘The declaration of the renowned Professor Koch … is accepted without question by the physicians of Toronto.’ ⁸ By August 24 Hamburg finally admitted that there had already been 120 cases of cholera and 35 deaths. The city’s official telegraph notices were sent to every port to prepare for Hamburg ships. Toronto newspapers reported that people were dying in Hamburg within six hours, sometimes in as little as one hour after coming down with the disease. ⁹ Toronto headlines exclaimed: ‘CHOLERA MAY COME. The Asiatic Type is at Hamburg and Havre! America Has Direct Communication! Washington Warned to Beware of the Scourge—A Steamship on the Way From Havre Which is to be Fumigated—This Continent in Genuine Danger.’ ¹⁰ Ships began to boycott Hamburg, ¹¹ and ships from Hamburg in other ports were no longer allowed to dock and were placed in quarantine. To deal with the crisis and clean their city, Hamburg’s city officials requested 38,000 gallons of disinfecting fluid from the London authorities. ¹² As one newspaper headline stated: ‘The Epidemic in Hamburg Worse than Any of the Nineteenth Previous.’ ¹³ But Hamburg rationalized that the city was not at fault; it was merely a victim of the scourge of dirty migrants travelling through.

The Hamburg authorities denied culpability, saying that they were merely the gateway onto the Atlantic that unleashed the cholera crisis from its source in the Russian interior. Yet the cholera crisis re-established and confirmed for shipping and port authorities that pandemic outbreaks were a common problem. The coverage from London, England, claimed British authorities had suspected that cholera had infected Hamburg even before Hamburg’s senate admitted the outbreak of the disease. Concealing local problems had international ramifications. The orders were to inspect everyone from Russia and Hamburg and specific instructions were given: ‘Dirty clothing and all baggage suspected of being infected with cholera will be burnt.’ ¹⁴ Hamburg was the most recent port during that pandemic to have an outbreak; however, Hamburg was distinct in terms of scale and intensity of the outbreak and the city’s key position in international shipping routes. The tone of the newspaper articles suggested that, because Hamburg had such extensive international connections, it was only a matter of time before another city would become a new nexus in the spreading pandemic. Many predicted that the next city would be New York City, particularly because a ship with cholera passengers was already travelling toward the city and Hamburg would not allow the shipping company to return to its port. However, to inspire reforms the cholera bacteria did not need to travel from Hamburg in the steerage passengers’ stomachs. The idea of a cholera crisis had already landed.

The force of ideas

I need to directly face the power of the idea of a cholera epidemic. According to the Spinozian philosopher Hasana Sharp, ideas are not right or wrong, instead we should engage ideas in terms of their ‘force, vitality, and power.’ This ‘requires attention to the collective dimensions of thinking life, where “collective” refers to a transpersonal accumulation of ideal power that includes human as well as nonhuman beings.’ Ideas are strengthened and weakened by other ideas, but also by incidents that happen (or do not happen in the case of 1892 in Toronto). The imagination of the crisis affected the world in ways that went beyond a question of how these ideas were shaped, behaved, and interacted with other ideas. ¹⁵ The geographer Vinay Gidwani, working with philosopher Louis Althusser’s tension between ‘imaginary’ and ‘lived,’ suggests that ‘ideology exists in the obviousness—empirical immediacy—of our world and the actions we take, imagining ourselves to be the center of initiatives.’ ¹⁶ The health experts who feared the future provide an excellent example of this tension. In their words and ideas, they placed themselves at the centre of a large movement to produce a world without disease. But in the negotiation with their ideologies, these health authorities regularly failed, were frustrated, needed support, felt impotent, and derided the public they took up the responsibility to protect. My argument is they lived out the ideas and imagery they articulated (they were saving the lives of those around them whose demise they saw as imminent). However, their imagination was collective, as the cholera bacteria demanded a reshaping of their idea of the world. From a different perspective, the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci helps to explain this relationship: ideologies overtake events and shape histories; events overtake ideologies and ‘explode schema.’ ¹⁷ Gramsci speaks of the ‘living out’ of thought, even in spite of what can be predicted. While Gramsci emphasizes how doctrines rely on ‘the normal course of events,’ he makes clear that ideology does not follow the normal course of events, and neither do events. ¹⁸ To paraphrase the geographer Geoff Mann’s take on Gramsci, what is of interest here is more than the discursive production of a cholera crisis. Actors involved in contests over the meaning and controls of ‘disease’ often understand the movement of ‘health’ not as more than a normative standard, but as an active, material force in the making of the world—what Gramsci called an ‘idea-force.’ ¹⁹ The idea of health and the crisis of cholera was a force to be reckoned with.

The term ideology opens long-standing theoretical debates that I do not have the space to go into here. For my purposes, I do not seek a theory of ideology nor intervene in the debates over the ideology’s ‘obsolesce.’ Instead, I want to understand ‘ideology in the time of cholera.’ I want to articulate a ‘minor’ history of crisis ideology, as a problem and a way of writing on contingency. ²⁰ Ideology is neither an illusion nor imposed ‘from above.’ Ideology is lived and spontaneous. In the archive, I follow ideology as a form of argumentation and speculation, rather than a set of ideas, beliefs, or knowledge. In the time of a cholera crisis, ideology was not a distortion of events, but a political space where speculative practices could engage with future events. Writing from this disposition, I follow how specific predictions created a unity of what needed to be done. As the cultural theorist Stuart Hall suggests: ‘[t]he whole purpose of what Gramsci called an organic (i.e., historically effective) ideology is that it articulates into a configuration, different subjects, different identities, different projects, different aspirations. It does not reflect, it constructs, a “unity” out of difference.’ ²¹ However, I want to assert that this unity cannot be reduced to homogeneity or uniformity. Rather, this ‘unity’ ²² was an assemblage—collective, while uneven—that contributed intensity and force behind this idea. The idea-force around a disease crisis emerged from: the speed and persistence of circulation of statements; the unity’s strength and coherence; the haste behind how these ideas were put into practice; and the fear of the future, illness, and death. For many health experts, the force of ‘ideology in the time of cholera’ came from the deployment of spontaneous and multiple practices. These experts relied on whatever health intervention they could muster. This unity accumulated into building ‘a cholera wall’ for North America, as this article will show. However, in writing a ‘minor’ history of this cholera crisis attention needs to be paid to how this accumulation emerged. To do so, I utilize Gramsci to understand this space of political action, the Spinoza tradition in describing the force of political ideas, and Foucault’s genealogy to write future event histories.

To further articulate this cholera crisis—as an idea, a history, and an event, and also as part of an ideological project—Foucault’s toolkit and methods allow me to trace the relations of power around the event. ²³ Foucault frames the event in a very specific way when he states: ‘The event on which one tries to get a hold will be the reality of grain much more than the obsessive fear of scarcity.’ ²⁴ This assessment of history accords with my archive. The microscopic biology of cholera (bacterium vibrio cholerae) was indeed isolated, ‘got hold of’ in the petri dish, well before the regulation of the modulations and transmission within international relations of the Atlantic (the epidemiology of cholera). In 1883, the microbiologist Robert Koch’s practices that ‘discovered’ the vibrio cholerae were validated before the disease was subject to international management and control. However, according to Foucault, we have to reject the idea of the irruption of a ‘real event’ from a secret origin. He suggests seeking origins drives the investigation back further and further into history, to search for a secret cause of events. In my case, following cholera back to its ‘birth in the Ganges’ was a powerful myth that had political and cultural ramifications. Foucault disparagingly suggested history’s intelligibility comes from assigning a cause, which is more or less a source of events; instead, he recommends searching for cumulative effects. Both statements and practices gain strength through repetition. One method I want to utilize is Foucault’s method of searching for a sudden irruption of a statement and what enabled this statement ‘to be repeated, known, forgotten, transformed, utterly erased, and hidden.’ ²⁵ Foucault’s method was to look at statements, or the accumulation of statements, in which causation is neither direct nor obvious, but instead is seen to build up over time and draw in disparate actors and logics.

Circulation of statements and the accumulation of ideas

The newspapers repeatedly reminded their readers, the real cholera problem was, and continued to be, India. India was perceived and declared to be the origin of cholera, the source of previous pandemic crises by the international medical community. Doctors and scientists blamed cholera transmission throughout the Atlantic on Muslim pilgrimages travelling from India to the Middle East. Many of the previous cholera pandemics were said to have originated at the yearly Hajj pilgrimages to Mecca. The London Daily News reported that cholera had been discovered in ‘the East.’ Constantinople reported that although the Mecca pilgrims had shown clean bills of health up to the present, several new cholera cases had been found. ²⁶ The Toronto Evening News gave a quick overview of ‘Meshad, the Sacred City of Persia, Home of the Scourge.’ Medical journals and the Western media repeatedly labeled India as the perpetual cause of cholera pandemics, even when this explanation did not adhere to the evidence in 1892.

The carriers of cholera from Hamburg were Russian Jews looking to cross the Atlantic, bound for North America in search of jobs and new lives. The European experience of Jewish migration was focused not just on shipping but also on rail transportation. By the 1890s, railway networks had spread across and connected western European nations with the Russian empire. These railways provided a swift new means of transportation for the disease. The 1892 the cholera pandemic had travelled overland from Afghanistan to Russia. The disease was in Moscow by July of that year. Jewish migrants bound for the United States via Hamburg were driven to migrate by famine, the pogroms, and the expulsion of Jews from Moscow. In response to these reports and the higher volume of Jewish passengers, the German Imperial Health Office sealed the border. Migrants were allowed to travel through the country but they could not stay in Germany. Jewish migrants were transported in sealed trains and no passenger was allowed to leave. If any migrant left the train, heavy disinfection of the train station and surrounding areas was required. ²⁷ The migrants had paid for passage to cross the Atlantic on shipping vessels whose foremost destination was New York City. Therefore, they were ‘stored’ in Hamburg and not allowed to leave the shipping companies’ facilities.

Though Hamburg’s lack of clean water supply was responsible for the spread of the epidemic, cholera fed into the long-standing stereotypes and structural discrimination against the Jewish community in European cities. While in Paris, headlines blared the French authorities’ warning to Canadians: ‘WATCH JEWISH IMMIGRANTS. Those on Their Way are in a Terrible Filthy State.’ The news reports suggested that the combination of the condition of the Jewish emigrants and the city was a ‘fertile field for its spread.’ News reports from Paris called the city a disaster waiting to happen. The Paris Jewish Committees said that in August, 1,000 Jewish refugees from Russia passed through Paris, and most were on their way to the United States. The recent arrivals ‘have been in a most filthy condition.’ ²⁸ The association between dirt and cholera had yet to be debunked, so these migrants were feared based on their appearance. A couple of days later, another report from Paris claimed that Russian Jews were planning to go through Canada to get into the US and avoid any quarantine measure.

Newspaper reports on cholera were sensational. Stories on the spread of the disease used a particular format. Newspapers constantly predicted which city would be the next site of infection. Toronto’s newspapers featured a sick city roll call: short reports from each major city and port stating the existing sanitary conditions or any cholera cases. As an example, Vienna was declared to be in a ‘[s]hocking state of filth and overcrowding’ with tons of rotting meat sausages and fruit, and if cholera reached Vienna, ‘the number of victims will run in the tens of thousands.’ ²⁹ In contrast, for St. Petersburg on September 2, 1892, the report was just a listing of official cholera ‘returns:’ ‘5,273 new cases and 2,722 deaths as a total 15,900 have already died.’ ³⁰ The daily newspapers’ reports on each city’s death toll and the event of a new city being added to the list of the infected must have had a tremendous effect on Toronto’s readers. Sometimes the reports would also declare false alarms and recant previous accounts; for example, the notices of cholera in Venezuela were false. These false reports would only lead to further confusion. There were also reports that doctors in Paris and London were misdiagnosing scarlet fever as cholera out of fear. Fear, confusion, and speculation were rampant.

Ideas overtake events: the living out of cholera speculation

A few Canadian officials made the astute judgment that if cholera was to enter North America in the fall of 1892 it would be through the United States, probably New York City. The United States delegates in Germany had been caught by surprise. Since Hamburg officials did not want other nations to know there was a cholera outbreak brewing, they hid the disease from the American Consul Charles Johnson who was stationed in their city. When the European consuls received the correct information, they immediately reported to Washington, according to procedure. The official notification was too late. Ships with sick migrants were already on their way across the Atlantic. But according to procedure, the outbreak notice was relayed to the Health Officer of the Port of New York, Dr. William Jenkins, along with directions for the customs officers to disinfect baggage from cholera-infected ports. ⁴⁰ Washington’s official position was clearly stated: ‘The greatest danger to which this country is exposed is from the hordes of emigrants. More than 50,000 come into this country every month, Germany heads the list, with natives of the British Isles second and Russians a good third.’ ⁴¹ Ships with migrants from Europe were placed under high scrutiny.

However, New York City doctors and medical experts exuded confidence. Both city and port officials declared New York ready for the cholera patients that were to arrive any day. New York City’s Sanitary Superintendent Cyrus Edson declared, ‘There is positively no danger to New York … The European outpost of the disease is, to be sure, unpleasantly near us, particularly in view of the heavy tide of emigration from Northern Europe with flows from Hamburg.’ But he correctly declared that the incubation of the disease guaranteed that cholera would be discovered during the Atlantic transit. Public health officials in New York City would be aware of who was sick before the ships docked in the city. Edson knew that cholera had to get into your internal digestive system to cause illness, and he assured the public that the mere presence of a person with cholera within a community was not a danger. He spoke of holding a child suffering from cholera in his arms and walking away without getting sick. He suggested that cities must purify their water, as cholera in polluted water lived on organic matter that allowed the germ to multiply. He worried that, if New York City’s Croton watershed became ‘impregnated with cholera germs,’ a citywide epidemic could take place. The Toronto Evening News editors ended the story with Edson outlining how cholera followed in the wake of war, famine, or other misfortunes, and how the present outbreak was directly connected to the famine in Russia. The report concluded with a small history lesson on how New York City had had five outbreaks during the 19th century and how an estimated 15,000 people had died. ⁴²

When cholera did arrive in New York City, three shipping vessels were put into quarantine. In Toronto, a constant detailed reporting on what was happening in New York City took place. As each ship with sick passengers arrived in its ports, the health officials restated their confidence of the city’s position. There were reports of the horror and panic of passengers who were quarantined on the ships in the harbor along with the sick. Many of the rich passengers begged the health commission to break quarantine and let them disembark. New York City policemen began patrolling the ships and port to make sure no one jumped ship to swim to shore. ⁴³ Despite all these fears, the New York City and North American cholera crisis never materialized.

New York City isolated the disease and was the only North American city to be affected by this cholera pandemic. Thirty-two people died in New York, but the majority of the deaths were among the Russian Jewish migrants quarantined on the ships, and this halted the spread of cholera. But these quarantine measures were politically unpopular. From some liberal circles, the act of keeping everyone at bay in quarantine reflected poorly on both the city and the nation. There had been long-standing criticism against New York City’s quarantine practices. Since 1888, New York City’s Committee of Physicians had warned that the quarantine facilities were inadequate to manage an outbreak and the lack of reform, despite their warnings, was probably due to financial constraints. New York City’s quarantine islands and stations lacked adequate water supplies and sanitary measures. Dr. William Jenkins, the health officer of the port, instituted the politically unpopular practice of keeping all migrants on ships floating in the bay during the outbreak. When ships tried to land against the quarantine, riots broke out. Though the disease was contained, Jenkins was publicly attacked for his mismanagement of the cholera outbreak. ⁴⁴ The condemnation was strange given that he had halted the spread of the disease.

However, federal authorities and medical experts throughout the United States called for reforms of the national quarantine measures. An editor of the Nation, E. L. Godkin, who had been forced to stay on one of the ships in the New York harbor, wrote influential pieces about his experiences in the Nation and the North American Review in a series called ‘Letters from the Normannia,’ the name of ship that he had travelled on. He attacked the quarantine measures as old fashioned, medieval, and even barbaric. Godkin supported his argument with expert opinions from The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, which had declared the quarantine of New York a ‘national disgrace about which the less said the better.’ Yet Godkin extolled his readers to take up a public outcry. He said the United States was still unprepared for the threat of cholera. He claimed that with the Columbian Fair in Chicago scheduled for the following year, thousands of migrants would be travelling into the interior of the continent, and a disease crisis was waiting to happen. ⁴⁵ Godkin asserted that people of his status, with either money or authority, who would be coming to the United States should not be kept for twenty days in quarantine before reaching the fair. Throughout the 1890s, in journals such as Harper’s Weekly, a regular discussion took place on immigration, quarantine, and the need for a national health agency.

Future crises, future events

So was all that fear and anxiety for nothing? Was this activity and time wasted, all unnecessary work? In Anderson’s words this crisis ‘generated excess’ in Toronto and many places across the Atlantic, and that excess was capitalized on and struggled over by experts and the state. However, these excesses were not geographically equivalent and comparable; unevenness pervades these events. To distinguish my definition of crisis from the more general category of the event, I will be pedantic, but also do some violence to these concepts to clarify my intervention. In my crude division, an event invoked direct material responses. For Hamburg, the combination of deaths, outbreak, and cholera bacteria as an event overtook the ideology that the German city was modern and clean. Further, cholera was a disaster and an emergency in Hamburg. However, for Toronto, a crisis formed in the intersection of fear, distant pandemic, and cholera predictions. The crisis also invoked direct material responses. The idea of cholera overtook local events, as Gramsci would say. Toronto’s crisis was dependent on Hamburg’s event, but it never became the emergency that it was predicted to become. While I have parsed out the event and the crisis to work toward a definition, these concepts cannot be divided. Event and crisis intersect as a ‘concrete-in-thought.’ ⁷³ Accordingly, the cholera pandemic of 1892 was, by definition, an international or trans-local phenomenon, in which Toronto had a part. Doctors, politicians, ship captains, colonial India, ironworkers, bacteria, and fear became assembled into a geographic imagination of a speculative future. Histories of this cholera pandemic crisis could be written about any one of the points where the crisis touched down. At each of these points, concrete practices and places (events) must deal with material relations and bodily sickness. Yet these acts of materially touching down are contingent on particular expressions and they intersected with abstractions and fears (crisis). For example, a newspaper article illustrates, but cannot contain, the excess of fear and speculation that was bound up in a crisis. Ideas such as ‘cholera may come’ determine the responses, which are predicated on the existing conditions. For an epidemic the object that triggers the crisis becomes an obsession. In this case, the object was the biological life form of cholera bacteria.

To further account for this distinction between the event and the crisis as political spaces, I will turn to Foucault in his different relations between discipline and security. On the one hand, the apparatus of discipline was an attempt to prevent and constrain in order to avoid the event. Security, on the other hand, attempted to create an apparatus that was able to work within fluctuations to prevent the crisis in advance. ⁷⁴ Health and disease continuously illustrated Foucault’s ideas. The management of smallpox was Foucault’s example of a security apparatus. To understand smallpox and security, he distinguished between prevailing disease (epidemic) and the case (single death). This difference highlighted, for Foucault, the crucial notion of acceleration within a range of risks and dangers. Foucault defined acceleration, when death numbers and cases grew rapidly as ‘[t]he phenomenon of sudden bolting [as in “bolt out the door” or unexpected action], which occurs regularly and is also regularly nullified, can be called, roughly—not exactly in medical terminology, since the word was already used to designate something else—the crisis. This crisis is this phenomenon of sudden circular bolting that can be checked either by a higher natural mechanism, or by an artificial mechanism.’ ⁷⁵ In this article, the cholera epidemic in the fall of 1892 became an international event because of the sudden bolting of cases in Hamburg—the rapid multiplication of cases that created an epidemic. On the ships in New York City’s harbor, the relationship of space and state power can illustrate the distinction between case and prevalence. A cholera outbreak existed on the ships. The prevalence of cholera depended on the context and the ability of the disease to circulate or bolt. Within the ship’s steerage, cholera was bolting; however, from the shores of New York City, the sick retained their status as ‘case’ because of the artificial mechanisms of the state that enforced quarantine. For New York City, the disease emergency event was checked as cases, which were due to the workings of artificial mechanisms like quarantine. While cholera was not prevented, the cholera fluctuations were prevented in advance. Because of this, the events of fall 1892 accord with Foucault’s definition of security. This explains the role, function, and emergence of an ‘artificial mechanism’ that deals with crisis. In this case that mechanism was the health state apparatus.

I should parse Foucault’s method of historical analysis and his description of the event, as distinct from his concept of power. The distinction between crisis and event is important to my work because Foucault gives my argument a sense of how the accumulation of statements (the crisis is coming, the crisis is coming, the crisis is coming) by health experts implied that a decision had to be made. Decisions are made in times of crisis, but these experts presupposed consensus rather than gaining consensus through political discussion. By implication, stopping cholera became an inherently good thing, and therefore anything to stop cholera deaths became an inherently good decision. I see my version of a crisis and its politics, informed by Foucault’s event, residing in the space between Antonio Gramsci’s notions of coercion and consent. But this leads to the question: Coercion of whom and consent to whom? I will leave this as an open question, because my claim is the idea of disease crises and the ideologies of health allowed authorities to evade the answers. Foucault helps to articulate the object of an epidemic crisis with a space of political action. Crisis, and the ways that ideology formed this crisis, must be actively constructed, but the crisis also fails, falls apart, and must be reformed. The crisis can be ignored. In the above account of the cholera crisis, a path was charted out between implicit consent around consensus of health reforms and the failure of health experts’ attempts to use coercion. A hegemony where consent is gained through the healthy good life and the coercion is threatened with fears of death. In this way, a version of Foucault can be integrated with the historical materialism of Gramsci. To acknowledge the particularity of the milieu makes Foucault’s power dependent and partial, and requires active construction and mobilization. Gramsci and ideology helps to distinguish which calls of impending crises have a force, within the widespread milieu of anxiety and rhetoric.

Conclusion: when and where do disease crises end?

These questions open up a broader question of history and geography: How do you mark the end of a disease crisis? Mike Davis asks as similar question to my own: ‘Where does the nightmare end?’ For Davis, imagined disasters and catastrophes, whose ecologies of fear simultaneously loom and threaten to loom, contain ideas of what might come. These ideas—from fiction, myth, or science—can shape landscapes. My larger project follows how the imagined cholera crisis fits into the larger landscape of the history of Toronto and the institutionalization of public health. ⁷⁶ In 1892, the United States successfully contained the cholera pandemic and the disease never infected Canada during this international outbreak. But this didn’t end the nightmare. Conventional histories of international disease outbreaks suggest that the fifth cholera pandemic ended in the year 1896. However, the sixth pandemic was well underway by 1899 and continued until 1923. From the perspective of North America’s medical experts, the fear and speculation from one pandemic bled into the next. During the sixth pandemic, the disease was confined to Asia and no one in Western Europe or the Americas got sick or died from cholera. However, speculation over cholera’s arrival continued for decades. The spectre of cholera haunted North American and European states well into the 1930s. My argument is that the presence of disease does not indicate the effect or the geography of an epidemic. When looking at the reforms of Toronto’s public health, the debates are never simply local; experts and government officials situate their responses in the larger context of Atlantic-wide shifts in policy and disease crises. These responses were articulated into statements. The statements that circulated in 1892 around cholera crossing the Atlantic structured the response to health threats for years to come. This frightening, amorphous threat that lurked over the horizon of the ocean shaped politics and practices in cities and ports and became an epidemic event. The idea of future crises persists to this day, as the literature on avian influenza and biosecurity illustrates.

Cholera had illustrated the dangers of the free movement of goods and people under capitalism. The circulation of goods and people throughout the north Atlantic region had become potentially deadly. North America’s demand for workers also supplied unwanted diseases. Epidemics had become an unpredictable, but constitutive part of the management of cities and nations, as well as the relationships between nations. If a port was shut down due to quarantine, this stoppage had serious economic consequences, especially during cyclic depressions in the economy. However, the need to stop the circulation of goods and labor was often dismissed because the causes of and ways to prepare for cholera epidemics were still highly debated. Beginning in the 1910s and beyond, governments slowly instituted disinfection technologies and health-based immigration restrictions such as the bill of health and the passport. Even though health experts were still highly uncertain of how cholera became a crisis, they instituted massive changes to prepare for epidemics and pandemics—they made a ‘cholera future’ present. These changes came not only through dealing with bacteria, but also due to the failure of bacteria to arrive. The force of ideas around the cholera crisis allowed experts to unify and live out their thoughts and predictions.