Based on a study of intersecting French archives (those of the Val de Grâce Hospital, the Service Historique de la Défense and the Archives Diplomatiques), and with the support of numerous printed sources, this article focuses on the handling of the bodies of French soldiers who died of cholera during the Crimean War (1854–56). As a continuation of studies done by historians Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman, the aim here is to consider how the diseased corpses of these soldiers reveal both the causes and circumstances of their deaths. Beyond the epidemiological context, these dead bodies shed light on the sanitary conditions and suffering resulting from years of military campaigns. To conclude, the article analyses the material traces left by these dead and the way that the Second Empire used them politically, giving the remains of leaders who died on the front lines of the cholera epidemic a triumphant return to the country and a state funeral.
Misinformation ’, The Lancet , 385 , 1275 – 1277 , doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(14)62382-5 . Cohn , S. and Kutalek , R. ( 2016 ), ‘ Historical Parallels, Ebola Virus Disease and Cholera: Understanding Community Distrust and Social Violence with Epidemics ’, PLOS Currents Outbreaks , 1 , http://currents.plos.org/outbreaks/index.html%3Fp
through contamination with excrement (such as typhus, typhoid fever, and cholera) became prevalent, and the volume of urban filth and efforts to remove it ‘surpassed its previous dimensions’. 24 Within this context, France and Britain were leading nations in public hygiene, the founding of which has been noted by historians and sociologists as a significant factor in the emergence of modern Western societies. 25 The establishment of public hygiene as a distinct scientific
time, because not only was its future global leadership unsuspected, but the diplomatic significance of foreign assistance in humanitarian crises was still being established. 2 Most observers at the time assumed that the long-established Red Cross and Red Crescent societies and the newly founded World Health Organization (WHO) would be the key international players. However, an opening for CDC came when smallpox and cholera broke out
of cholera, as well as the venomous snakes of India. Not all the medical officers wrote up their experiences in the form of diaries, but many did; six published memoirs, written by medical practitioners, appeared in the year after the Mutiny, alongside Greenhow’s more practical Notes Medical and Surgical Taken during the Late Siege of Lucknow (1858).12 Along with recording key aspects of the struggle (the common events that Klaver terms the ‘public narrative’ of the siege) these texts provide considerable detail of individual actions both in the native and European
to the plague pandemic that went around the world in 1894–1901. 14 Bacteriological research into cholera, malaria and plague was launched in this period in colonial North Africa and tropical Asia by British, French and Dutch microbiologists. Several vaccine institutes were established in late Victorian India, well before many European countries, in response to plague, cholera and other diseases. As Ilana Löwy and Pratik Chakrabarti have
bacteriologist Waldemar Haffkine was based in India from 1893, where he tested vaccines against cholera and plague. 8 Indians often reacted to vaccination with indifference or resistance. Some might have rejected it, because it was foreign and unknown or because it was seen as secular rival to the religiously inscribed practice of variolation. In such instances, vaccination might have served as ‘a site of conflict
typhoid fever and cholera that began to sweep through English and Egyptian ranks from mid-June onwards. Lieutenant-Colonel Beale, Lieutenant Hutchinson and several North Staffordshires were invalided to Cairo, and, on 1 July, the battalion moved camp to Gemai. Within a day of their arrival another man was struck down and over the next six weeks cholera took a heavy toll of officers and other ranks. Astell
, the Superior Board of Health, with the support of the National Bacteriology Institute, established bacteriology stations in some ports, in order to diagnose cases of plague and cholera and vaccinate against both illnesses; in the case of cholera, with Jaume Ferran's vaccine. 20 Smallpox and rabies vaccines were excluded from the Bacteriology Institute's responsibilities, as the Superior Board of Health produced them itself
Enlightenment really became widely established only after mortality patterns began to improve. This was brought about largely by three great contributions to fighting infectious disease. The first improvement was better hygiene and public health, particularly the provision of clean water supplies and effective sewage disposal; but also 22 Freedom of science: promises and hazards more hygienic ways of preparing and storing food. An important early example showing the importance of clean water was the work of John Snow who in 1854 traced a large epidemic of cholera to the
