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
This book examines the relationship between environmental justice and citizen science, focusing on enduring issues and new challenges in a post-truth age. Debates over science, facts, and values have always been pivotal within environmental justice struggles. For decades, environmental justice activists have campaigned against the misuses of science, while at the same time engaging in community-led citizen science. However, post-truth politics has threatened science itself. This book makes the case for the importance of science, knowledge, and data that are produced by and for ordinary people living with environmental risks and hazards. The international, interdisciplinary contributions range from grassroots environmental justice struggles in American hog country and contaminated indigenous communities, to local environmental controversies in Spain and China, to questions about “knowledge justice,” citizenship, participation, and data in citizen science surrounding toxicity. The book features inspiring studies of community-based participatory environmental health and justice research; different ways of sensing, witnessing, and interpreting environmental injustice; political strategies for seeking environmental justice; and ways of expanding the concepts and forms of engagement of citizen science around the world. While the book will be of critical interest to specialists in social and environmental sciences, it will also be accessible to graduate and postgraduate audiences. More broadly, the book will appeal to members of the public interested in social justice issues, as well as community members who are thinking about participating in citizen science and activism. Toxic Truths includes distinguished contributing authors in the field of environmental justice, alongside cutting-edge research from emerging scholars and community activists.
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