Coping with Cholera

The purpose of this lesson is to explore sources which reveal something about the contemporary medical understanding of the disease, public attitudes and the role of the General Board of Health over a time frame of series of cholera epidemics in Victorian England. For some, the best advice against the disease was to improve ventilation, cleanliness and purge the body, keep it warm or change the diet. For others it required prayer and forgiveness from God. Again, it is interesting to consider why many of these ideas persisted after the breakthrough provided by Dr John Snow in 1854 that linked the presence of contaminated water to the spread of cholera at a time when the authorities and medical profession believed that the disease was spread by miasma, or bad air caused by pollution.