Second cholera pandemic
The second cholera pandemic also known as the Asiatic Cholera Pandemic was a Cholera pandemic from 1829–1849.[1]
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[edit] History
This pandemic began, like the first, with outbreaks along the Ganges River delta. From there the disease spread along trade routes to cover most of India. By 1828 the disease had traveled to China and was at the southern tips of the Ural Mountains in 1829. It reached England in December 1831: first in Sunderland then Gateshead then Newcastle. In London, the disease claimed 6,536 victims; in Paris, 20,000 succumbed (out of a population of 650,000) with about 100,000 deaths in all of France.[2] The epidemic reached Russia (see Cholera Riots), Quebec, Ontario and New York in the same year and the Pacific coast of North America between 1832 and 1834.[1]
[edit] Legacy
Norwegian Poet Henrik Wergeland wrote a stage-play inspired by the pandemic, as it reached as far as Norway. The Indian Cholera, as he called it, criticized British colonialism for spreading the pandemic.
As a result of the epidemic one major medical advance was made - the intravenous saline drip, which developed from the work of Dr Thomas Latta of Leith, near Edinburgh. Latta established from blood studies that a saline drip greatly improved the condition and saved many lives as a result, sadly not including his own.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ a b "Cholera's seven pandemics". Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. December 2, 2008. http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2008/05/09/f-cholera-outbreaks.html. Retrieved 2008-12-11. "The second pandemic started in India and reached Russia by 1830 before continuing into Finland and Poland. A two-year outbreak began in England in October 1831 and claimed 22,000 lives. Irish immigrants, fleeing poverty and the potato famine, carried the disease from Europe to North America. On their arrival in the summer of 1832, 1,220 died in Montreal and another thousand across Quebec. The disease then entered the U.S. through Detroit and New York, and reached Latin America by 1833. Another outbreak across England and Wales began in 1848, killing 52,000 over two years."
- ^ Charles E. Rosenberg (1987). The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866. University of Chicago Press.
