Asiatic Cholera and the Raw Material of Race

This is the story of Asiatic cholera, as told by John A. Benson's 1893 treatise on the subject:

Up from the dark Plutonian caverns of Erebus, up from the clouded Stygian valley, up from the depths of hell, in the early part of this century, arose the Goddess of Filth, and she wandered around over the face of the globe, seeking for a home to her liking. And coming to the delta of the Ganges, in this low, insalubrious and festering locality, where so many noxious and noisome diseases are generated, and where so many epidemics have arisen and so often swept over the earth with most fatal and desolating effects,—here she met, one dark and stifling night, with gaunt Despair. And surrounding her with his bony arms, Despair threw her on the foul, dark and slimy ground, and had his will of her. And when the day of her reckoning was reached, here in the neighborhood of Jessore—a town in the center of the delta—in agony and in shame and in desolation, Filth gave birth to the monstrosity yclept,—Asiatic cholera. And here she nurtured and fed him, here in this vast pest-house where every conceivable vegetable and animal substance is left upon the soil to rot in the heat and dews of a tropical climate,—here Filth fed her offspring from her own breasts, and as he grew and waxed strong, and his tusks and teethappeared so that he would chew and tear her dugs, she longed to wean him, and one day as he ferociously fastened himself upon her, she cast him away on the mud, and as his mouth was forcibly torn from the dug, some of her foul milk was scattered around, and falling into the water of the Ganges, as drops, was at once coagulated by the water, and became—the Spirilla Cholerae Asiaticae. (25)

In this epic invocation of the disease, Benson imagines the genesis of Asiatic cholera on the polluted banks of the Ganges as the result of a brutal environmental rape. The unwanted product of a hellish environment, the bastard child of "Filth" and "Despair," Asiatic cholera's is the case history of a criminal type. Describing an eerily Oedipal drama of epidemic, Benson envisions a psychology of infection in which the virulence of the disease results from being prematurely torn from the nurturing breast. Cholera, filled with anger at his mother, develops a kind of contagious character flaw, an unhealthy need to spread his devastation around. Born in 1817 in the Indian town of Jessore (about a hundred miles from Calcutta), cholera matured over the course of the 1820s into a marauder of "malignant character" (Jameson 167), an incompetent military commander whose circuitous route across Europe betrayed the backwardness of the world from which it came: "We never thought cholera would be so bad a general, with the example of Napoleon before his eyes, as to penetrate into the north of Europe, where, as we believed, like his great prototype, his force would be destroyed by frost and snow" ("The Contagious Character of Cholera" 123). Cruel and confused, a "monster" (Jameson 165) "truly of a protean nature" (Jameson 103), cholera's violence was all the more frightening for being totally unpredictable—"so diversified in its phases, so erratic in its general character, that it must be treated in its individuality" (Jameson 239), "choleraic perniciousness" was consistent only insofar as it habitually expressed itself in "deadly assaults" (Jameson 167) on the poor inhabitants of European cities.

Asiatic cholera took shape in the Victorian imagination as an Oriental raider, a barbaric force whose progress westward exposed the weak spots of an expanding industrial culture. According to the Canadian physician and health commissioner Robert Nelson, for example, Asiatic cholera is the most distinctive event of the nineteenth century:

The 19th century is remarkable for the great events that have taken place since its commencement, and a short time previously. In it the knowledge of steam, its powers, the means of controlling it, its uses as a substitute for bodily and manual labor, and its complete obedience to the hand of man, have been perfected.

Chemistry, already in its infancy, has become an exact science.

Electricity and magnetism have advanced from being mere toys to a grade of highest utility. Geology has disinterred the long buried almanac of the globe, brought clearly into light the reign of extinct creations, overwhelmed and hidden since millions of years have passed away. These are only a few of the remarkable occurrences; but the one which distinguishes this century more than all others of which history makes mention, in relation to man, is the stupendous plague called Cholera. Stupendous from its widespread malignancy over every continent; stupendous from the millions of victims it has swallowed; stupendous from the rapidity of its spread; stupendous from the few brief moments of life it allows to those it attacks: apparently capricious in its selections, it has desolated some places, spared others; terrified nations, arrested the march of armies, and baffled the efforts of man to arrest its empire. (13-14)

For Nelson, the most characteristic event of a century of progress is the emergence of an Oriental force capable of overthrowing the Western world; what symbolizes the industrial revolution more than any one technological event is the violent colonization of the West by an Eastern disease that is itself immune to the controlling powers of scientific modernity. Imagining cholera as a kind of military invader, an infectious imperialist who not only destroyed lives but also dismantled the terms on which the West understood itself, Victorian physicians and social critics used the epidemic disease as a means of questioning how the West was securing its own global economic power.

Infecting all the filthiest spots of Europe and America, Asiatic cholera found a particularly hospitable home in the English slum, where it thrived amid the distinctive dirt of British streets. The great paradox of cholera was, indeed, its terrible power over the country that so thoroughly dominated its place of origin. An upstart Eastern infection that ought never to have come as far as it did, Asiatic cholera exposed the frailties of England's urban industrial structure, ravaging it on four separate occasions in as many decades. Cholera first showed itself on English shores in the shipping town of Sunderland in the fall of 1831, and over the next few months spread to Scodand, Manchester, the Midlands, and London. That outbreak killed around half of its victims, leaving 32,000 English subjects dead and thousands more devastated, destitute, and weak. Cholera struck again in 1848-49, killing 62,000; in 1853-54, killing 20,000; and again in 1866-67, killing 14,000 (Wohl 118). Attacking the weak spots in the most powerful nation in the world with devastating accuracy and speed, cholera was seen as a sort of somatized social critique, a lethal disease whose pathological patterns provided a...