In the summer of 1854, Saint John and the neighbouring town of Portland were hit by cholera, which ended up killing between 1100 and 1500 people. In this episode Mark and Greg discuss how cholera was spread, its effects on those it infected, and how competing theories at the time proliferated the disease and lessened the effectiveness of prevention and care.
The disease, which was spread by polluted drinking water, arrived in Saint John on a vessel from Liverpool. Britian was already experiencing cholera, part of a pandemic originating in India in the 1840s and would not run its course until 1860. Cholera, if untreated, induces a severe form of diarrhea that is fatal in most cases.
In Saint John, the highest death tolls were among poor and immigrant populations who lived in low-lying tenement districts with poor drainage, limited access to clean drinking water and primitive methods for disposing of human waste. Although the elderly and very young of the working class were most vulnerable, the disease also affected citizens living in middle class and elite city blocks and even those in rural areas surrounding the city.
Many doctors and public health officials did not believe that the disease was contagious; rather, they believed that the culprit was “miasma” or noxious vapours emanating from the ground, swamps and garbage. They focused on unsanitary homes and streets as the cause. They also blamed lower-class victims who supposedly abused alcohol and consumed unhealthy diets. Some believed that the city’s strong harbour tides or famous fog minimized the threat of cholera.
The Board of Health attempted to respond to the crisis relying on the flawed knowledge of the era, with poor results. The immediate emphasis on ‘cleaning up’ did not get to the root of the problem- the water supply- but it did bring some associated benefits.
Although business in the city was compromised in the short run, the economy recovered quickly after the threat had passed. The tragic legacy was the large number of orphaned children.
Some lessons were learned and improvements made, but many of the sanitation problems of Victorian Saint John would not be addressed until after the Great Fire of 1877. Cholera, deadly but short-lived, was another example of why it made sense for basic infrastructure in Saint John to be delivered by public utilities as opposed to private enterprise.
Primary sources:
Murdoch, Gilbert, Special report of the Commissioners of Sewerage and Water Supply for the city of Saint John and town of Portland, on the formation of anchor ice (Saint John: Daily News, 1881).
Provincial Archives of New Brunswick. Cholera Deaths in Saint John and Portland, NB, 1854
Secondary sources:
Acheson, T.W., Saint John: The Making of an Urban Colonial Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984).
Bilson, Geoffrey, “The Cholera Epidemic in Saint John. N.B., 1854,” Acadiensis, Vol. 4 (1) (Autumn 1974): 85-99
Bilson, Geoffrey, A Darkened House: A Cholera in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980).
Hamlin, Christopher, Cholera: the biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Whooley, Owen, Knowledge in the Time of Cholera: the struggle over American medicine in the nineteenth century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
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