It was worse than the early days of AIDS.
Cholera first struck St. Louis in 1832. All anyone knew, via steamships and East Coast newspapers, was that this bizarre and swiftly lethal disease had come from Europe, where it was killing thousands in London and Paris. In The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson quotes an English newspaper describing victims who were “one minute warm, palpitating, human organisms—the next a sort of galvanized corpse, with icy breath, stopped pulse, and blood congealed—blue, shrivelled up, convulsed.”
Sr. Francis Xavier Love was a Sister of Charity (the order now known as the Daughters of Charity) who nursed in the St. Louis hospitals. The last week of October was the worst, she wrote to her order’s leaders in Emmitsburg, Pa.: “We saw large, strong-bodied men suddenly struck and expire in a few hours, and before we could remove one corpse, a second, a third, and a fourth were ready.”
The disease loosened the bowels and let loose gushes of what was called ricewater stool (the floating white specks were bits of lining from the small intestine). The explosive diarrhea was followed by a hurling up of the contents of the stomach. Patients’ eyes sank into their heads; their skin turned leathery, their lips bluish.
The sisters nursed day and night: “Everyone who had health ran away from us; the washer-women went off, leaving the tubs full of wet clothes,” Love wrote. “Only one person stood his ground like a true soldier of the Cross,” she added, describing a Vincentian brother who “brought the sick to both the hospitals on his back and remained with us day and night to help in nursing them. It is he who removed the dead bodies for us. When the corpse is not too heavy, he takes it in his arms and carries it out of our way, and when it is too weighty two or three Sisters assist him.”
The plague’s power terrified St. Louis. But after several hundred deaths, “the cholera” abruptly ended. The St. Louis Protestant Orphans’ Asylum (today, Edgewood Children’s Center) was built to house the orphans.
December, 1848: “The cholera” returns with a vengeance. Some blame the Missouri Republican, because it’s just begun publishing on the Sabbath. Some blame sauerkraut. Most believe cholera is caused by a miasma, a sort of thick cloud of death that hangs in the air, formed of toxic gases from rotting manure, vegetation, animal carcasses, and human waste.
St. Louis’ population is now 10 times what it was in 1832. Thousands of new immigrants jostle with the gold prospectors who stop at the Gateway to the West to get outfitted. The cholera sweeps first through the poorest areas, and is interpreted as a condemnation of immigrants’ alleged ignorance, laziness, and moral laxity.
Fear has brought its constant companion: hatred of the other.
In truth, cholera is not airborne; nor is it a wrathful God’s punishment of the poor. It is entering people’s bodies through contaminated water.
It often does arrive, however, with Irish and German immigrants. Crowded below deck for a rough six-week passage across the Atlantic, they step onto the New Orleans dock, woozy and dehydrated, and drink great gulps of contaminated water. By the time they sail upriver to St. Louis, many are already ill.
On May 4, 1849, St. Louis takes over Arsenal Island, four miles south of downtown, and renames it Quarantine Island. All ships must stop here to be inspected, and anyone showing symptoms must remain on Quarantine Island, nursed in a hastily built hospital, until they either recover or die. Victims are buried in a graveyard on the island, which will wash away entirely by the 1860s.
None of this quarantining prevents bacteria-laden diarrhea from infecting St. Louis’ water supply. Chamber pots are still casually tilted out into the streets. Heavy storms have washed out the limestone caves and sinkholes where raw sewage was being dumped. The overflow creates a greenish, fetid open sewer angrily dubbed Kayser’s Lake, after city engineer Henry Kayser.
People do whatever they can think of to survive—and some preserve a certain wry humor in the process. At the end of 1848, 17 seminarians write a petition in French, titling it “Le Cholera!!! Le Cholera!!!” and begging “tres reverand pere Recteur” to allow them to smoke “tabac,” insisting that both medical doctors and botanists swear it will ward off the cruel enemy.
In The Whiskey Merchant’s Diary (Ohio University Press, 2006), Joseph J. Mersman’s May 6, 1849, entry notes that his business partner, Clemens, has taken his wife to a farm: “Her Physicians have all recommended Country Air—the Old Lady her mother has taken it into her Noddle [noodle] that she is able to Cure herself.
“The city,” Mersman continues, “looks like a desert…. People parting for a day or two, bid farewell to each other.” A week later, he writes, “I and Clemens sleep in the Same bed, in Case of a Sudden attack to be within groaning distance.”
On May 17, The Great Fire destroys 27 steamboats and 14 blocks of downtown buildings. The fresh horror proves a temporary distraction.
By the third week of June, cholera is killing roughly 100 people a day. “It was a fearful time nothing to be seen but one funeral after another the horses often on a trot and full drive back to go to any other,” notes N.D. Allen in a rushed diary entry. On June 24, citizens crowd into a public meeting at the courthouse and tell the city government to either do something or resign.
The city does what cities always do: creates a committee. Its 12 members spring into action, ordering coal, tar, and sulfur burned in the streets. They ban fresh produce, keep omnibuses out of the slums, and direct churches to stop all that bell-tolling for funerals. Then they spend $10,000 to buy scavenger and slop carts and hire street cleaners, telling them to dump “liquid filth” into the once idyllic Chouteau’s Pond, already gray with industrial waste.
“Scavenger carts will be provided on Friday the 29th to visit every locality and remove these collections,” note the committee minutes. “Slop carts, also, will be provided for the carrying of slops and liquid filth… So much of the offensive matter as may be solid will be required to be collected in a heap.”
At the June 30 meeting, the committee resolves to “recommend that Monday the 2nd day of July be observed as a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer to Almighty God to stay the pestilence now devouring our city…and that the stores, shops, houses of amusements and other public houses be closed.”
People take to signing letters in a cautionary tone: “Take care of yourself and don’t take the cholera.” Businessman W.M. Hall writes a colleague expressing “regret that the epidemic which is raging so forcefully here will probably cut us off from a very large share of patronage… This is getting to be a gloomy city, no cheerfulness visible on mens countenances…and no sound save the gloomy tolling of the cathedral bell.”
The deaths give agnostics faith (“Papa and Uncle Leduc again took up practice of religion,” a Papin wrote after the 1932 epidemic) and make the faithful fervent. The Rev. Thomas B. Chambers, S.J., writes that in May, 1849, the Rev. John B. Druyts, S.J., president of Saint Louis College (now University), “assembled the Students and exhorted them to place themselves under direct protection of the Blessed Virgin.” Should they survive, they would buy a silver crown for a statue in the chapel. “The effect of this holy resolution seemed to have dispelled all fear from the minds of the students,” Chambers notes, “although they were aware that victims of the disease were carried out to the grave from every house around the College.”
In what is instantly pronounced a miracle, there were no deaths within the walls of the College. “Two of the students died of it, it is true, but both during vacations,” Chambers adds. In October 1849, a silver crown is placed on a purple cushion and carried reverently to the statue.
More practical prevention comes in 1850, when the city drains both Kayser’s Lake and Chouteau’s Pond. Not because, as people still believe, the draining lessens the “miasma,” but because it forces the city to install a sanitary sewage system. Cholera will return before the century ends, but it will never again be as lethal.
Death tolls for the 1849 epidemic vary, but the most common is just under 6,000—about one in every 11 St. Louisans. People write of finding four and five dead bodies in one house; of burying young mothers and placing their children in an asylum.
And still, no one knows why.
A physician writing in the 1866 St. Louis Medical Journal lists two possible causes: “Liebig’s albuminoid or Pasteur’s animalcular.” As prevention, he praises horse piss, noting that men who work in stables “never or seldom take the cholera, because they inhale continually that ammonia, which keeps their blood in a super-fluid condition.”
For those unfortunates whose blood has not thus benefited, treatments range from bleedings and enemas to calomel (mercurous chloride), which, irony of ironies, has laxative properties. Alas, if you take too much of it, your hair falls out, and your teeth turn soft as butter.
John Wilson, in New Orleans, brags to Gen. Geo. R. Smith, in Missouri in 1849: “It is the easiest possible disease cured… Take ordinary doses of calomel until it stops this looseness, then you are through with it… If this does not do as it may fail sometimes but very seldom—…don’t wait for doctor or anybody else—make a powder of 40 grams of calomel 2 grams of opium and 2 grams of camphor… Bleed in the a.m.”
One cholera victim takes unwitting revenge against Wilson by downing large quantities of brandy and dying outside his door. Wilson writes that with “his screams, pukings, and groanings with cramps indeed it seemed as if the furies were just absolutely seizing to abduct him directly to the infernal regions—yes sir they would have awakened any thing that had life.”
In 1854, Dr. John Snow makes a map of London’s wells that linked cholera to contaminated drinking water.
In 1884, Dr. Robert Koch isolates Vibrio cholerae, the comma-shaped bacillus that was contaminating the water.
We now know that a healthy adult has to ingest about 1 million of these bacteria to succumb to the disease. Most of the bacilli don’t survive a bath in stomach acid, but the toughest make it to the small intestine, where they grow curly tails that propel them into the mucus lining and cause gallons of water, laden with their offspring, to gush from the body.
Since 2000, there have been outbreaks of cholera across Africa, in Iraq during the war, in India, and in Vietnam. It remains a miserable disease and an unmistakable sign of unsanitary conditions—but seldom does anyone die of the disease anymore.
Turns out, the cure is far simpler than Wilson ever imagined: Give enough fluids and electrolytes to ward off dehydration.
Jeannette Cooperman is SLM‘s staff writer.
Sources:
Warm thanks for the assistance of Christine Harper at the Saint Louis University Archives, David Miros at the Midwest Jesuit Archives, and Carole Prietto at the Daughters of Charity St. Louis Province Archives.
John Wilson’s January 26, 1849 letter, Papin 1832 letter, “N.D. Allens Diary,” and a bound copy of Proceedings Committeee of Public Health 1849 are in the archives of the Missouri Historical Society.
Fr. Thomas B. Chambers’ letter was written to Fr. Joseph G. Kernian on October 5, 1899, and is in the Midwest Jesuit Archives.
The student petition to smoke tobacco and the W.M. Hall letter are in the Saint Louis University Archives.
Sr. Love’s letter was reprinted in Numerous Choirs: A Chronicle of Elizabeth Bayley Seton and Her Spiritual Daughters, vol. II., compiled and edited by Ellin M. Kelly (Evansville: Mater Dei Provincialate, 1996).
Description of St. Louis population from the Missouri Republican, December 21, 1848.
Symptomology summarized in “Sick City: Maps and Mortality in the Time of Cholera,” by Steven Shapin, The New Yorker, November 6, 2006, a book review of The Ghost Map The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, by Steven Johnson (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006).
