Second Cholera Pandemic (1826-1837): Cholera Reaches Europe

The second cholera pandemic was the wave of cholera that spread out of India in the late 1820s and, for the first time, struck Russia, western Europe and North America. Between about 1829 and 1837 it killed hundreds of thousands of people, provoked riots and panics, and forced governments to create the first modern boards of health. Historians date its start differently, from 1826 to 1829, but its impact on the West was concentrated in the years 1830 to 1837.

Origins and route to Russia

After the first cholera pandemic died down, the disease remained endemic in Bengal. From around 1826 it began spreading again, across northern India and along caravan routes through Afghanistan and Persia into Central Asia.

In 1829 cholera reached Orenburg, a Russian frontier town on the southern Urals trade route. In 1830 it advanced from Persia to Astrakhan and up the Volga, and in the autumn of 1830 it reached Moscow. The Russian government imposed military cordons and quarantines, but these failed and caused great resentment. Trade fairs and river traffic were disrupted, food prices rose, and many people saw the restrictions as more threatening than the disease.

In June 1831 cholera reached St Petersburg. Crowds who believed that doctors were poisoning the people attacked a cholera hospital in Sennaya Square. Emperor Nicholas I came to the square in person and, according to well-known accounts, ordered the crowd to kneel and pray, which helped calm the unrest. That summer, soldiers in the military settlements of Novgorod province also rose in a bloody revolt linked to cholera fears.

Across Europe

War helped the disease move west. Russian troops sent to crush the November Uprising in Poland brought cholera with them in 1831. Both the Russian commander, Field Marshal Hans Karl von Diebitsch, and Grand Duke Constantine died of it that June.

From Poland it spread into Prussia, Austria and Hungary. In northeastern Hungary, in what is now eastern Slovakia, peasants rose in the summer of 1831, convinced that nobles and officials were poisoning wells; the uprising was suppressed with executions. In Prussia, the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz died of cholera in November 1831, and the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel died in Berlin the same month, officially of cholera, though some modern writers doubt the diagnosis.

Britain established a Central Board of Health in June 1831 in anticipation of the disease. Cholera arrived at the port of Sunderland in October 1831 and spread to Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Liverpool, Manchester and Dublin in 1832. Rumours that cholera hospitals were a means of obtaining bodies for anatomists, a fear fed by the recent Burke and Hare murders in Edinburgh, led to cholera riots in Liverpool, Manchester and other towns. Britain and Ireland together lost roughly 50,000 to 60,000 people.

Paris, 1832

Cholera reached Paris in late March 1832, just as the carnival season was ending. Within weeks it was killing hundreds of people a day. By the time the epidemic subsided that autumn, about 18,000 to 19,000 Parisians had died, out of a population of around 785,000.

The poor districts of central and eastern Paris, crowded and lacking clean water, were hit hardest. Rumours that the rich or the government were poisoning food and wells led to mob attacks, and several people suspected of poisoning were killed in the streets in April. The German poet Heinrich Heine, then living in Paris, described the panic, the masked balls held in defiance of the disease and the rows of coffins in reports for a German newspaper, later collected in his book on French conditions.

The epidemic did not spare the powerful. The prime minister, Casimir Perier, who had visited cholera patients at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital with the Duke of Orléans, fell ill and died on 16 May 1832. General Jean Maximilien Lamarque, a popular opposition figure, died of cholera on 1 June. His funeral on 5 June became the starting point of the republican June Rebellion, later immortalised in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.

North America and beyond

In 1832 emigrant ships from Britain and Ireland brought cholera across the Atlantic. Canadian authorities set up a quarantine station at Grosse Île in the St Lawrence River, but the disease reached Quebec and Montreal in June. It then spread to New York, where about 3,500 people died that summer, and to Philadelphia, the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi. New Orleans suffered a devastating epidemic in October and November 1832.

Americans often interpreted cholera in moral and religious terms. Many preachers and newspapers described it as a punishment for sin, drunkenness and disorder, and noted that it struck the poor, immigrants and African Americans hardest. When churches asked President Andrew Jackson to proclaim a national day of fasting and prayer in 1832, he declined, arguing that it was not a federal matter; several state governors proclaimed such days instead.

Cholera also struck Mexico, Cuba and Central America in 1833. In the Muslim world it reached Mecca during the pilgrimage season of 1831, and pilgrims carried it to Egypt, where it caused heavy losses in Cairo and Alexandria. Waves continued in southern Europe until 1837, with severe outbreaks in Naples and Palermo in 1836 and 1837.

Medicine and public health

Doctors still did not understand cause or transmission. Most blamed miasma, foul air from filth and decay; others argued for contagion. The failure of cordons in Russia, Prussia and Austria persuaded many doctors that cholera was not simply contagious, and quarantines were relaxed in several countries. Even so, the epidemics produced important responses. Governments set up boards of health, collected statistics, and began to link high death rates with overcrowding, poor drainage and poverty.

One medical innovation stands out. In 1832 the Scottish physician Thomas Latta of Leith injected salt solution into the veins of dying cholera patients, reviving some of them. His results, reported in The Lancet, anticipated modern rehydration therapy, but the technique was not widely adopted for decades.

The epidemics also fed the sanitary movement in Britain. Investigators collected evidence on housing, drainage and death rates, and in 1842 Edwin Chadwick published his Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. It helped lead to the Public Health Act of 1848, passed as cholera returned in a third pandemic. In Paris, statistical studies of the 1832 epidemic similarly showed how poverty and overcrowding shaped death rates.

Timeline

• c. 1826: A new wave of cholera begins spreading from Bengal.
• 1829: Cholera reaches Orenburg on Russia’s southern frontier.
• 1830, autumn: Moscow suffers its first cholera epidemic.
• 1831, June: Cholera riots break out in St Petersburg; Diebitsch and Grand Duke Constantine die of cholera during the Polish campaign.
• 1831, October: Cholera arrives in Sunderland, England.
• 1832, March to May: Paris is struck; prime minister Casimir Perier dies on 16 May.
• 1832, June: Cholera reaches Quebec, Montreal and New York; Lamarque’s funeral sparks the Paris June Rebellion.
• 1833: Epidemics strike Mexico and Cuba.
• 1836-1837: Severe outbreaks in Naples and Palermo mark the last major European wave.

Why it matters

The second cholera pandemic brought a terrifying new disease to the cities of Europe and North America, exposing the link between poverty, dirty water and death. It shaped the politics of the time, from Russian unrest to the Paris uprising of 1832, and it pushed governments to create public health institutions. Later epidemics, investigated by doctors such as John Snow during the Broad Street outbreak of 1854, finally revealed how cholera spread.