— from Jens Kruse —
When I was a child my grandfather would take me for long walks and tell me stories. One of these was about the cholera epidemic in Hamburg in 1892.
This epidemic was part of the fifth international cholera pandemic
(1881–1896) in the 19th century. The outbreak in Hamburg was the
largest in Europe. Hamburg lost almost 10,000 of its citizens even
though Robert Koch had identified the Vibrio cholerae bacterium about
a decade earlier and had described its transmission through excrement
in water. While many other cities and municipalities had begun to equip
their water systems with filters to make sure the water was safe, the
city fathers, mostly from the merchant class of Hamburg, a patrician
republic, were disinclined to spend the money to make the water supply
safe. Once the disease started spreading they minimized its danger and
suppressed information.
All of this my grandfather did not tell me. I learned it later.
His story was more personal. Many members in his nuclear family that
included the parents and seven children fell ill. Two of his older sisters
died. He identified the disease as cholera, but he did not give any
account of the course of the disease. I think that may have been because
he was not alive at the time. He was one of the younger siblings, born, I
think, in 1896. So his story must have been based on what his parents
and other relatives told him. In spite of that he presented the story with
great immediacy and vividness, a sign, I think, of how impressed he
must have been as a child by what his parents told him. I in turn, in my
own childish way, was impressed, and somewhat terrified, that people’s
lives could be so suddenly upended and changed forever.
A year after the cholera outbreak, the citizens of Hamburg voted their
businessmen leaders out of office. They replaced the merchants with
leaders who belonged to the Social Democrats, a working-class party
that prioritized science and health over profit.
