Outbreak!: 50 Tales of Epidemics that Terrorized the World

by Beth Skwarecki

Neither British nor Indian physicians had any good ideas about how to treat or stop cholera. (Even today, our best treatment is to simply keep the person hydrated until the disease runs its course.) The British were still working from a theory about needing to balance the four humors, and their main medical tools were bloodletting and drugs that would cause vomiting and even more diarrhea. Indians weren’t as big on bloodletting, but otherwise their approach was similar, based on an idea about three humors that needed to be balanced: air, bile, and phlegm. Neither approach explained, or stopped, the rampage of Vibrio cholerae. The disease spread west, too. In 1821, a battle in Oman, near the southeast corner of Saudi Arabia, involved British soldiers that had been in India. The disease spread from there, into modern-day Iran, Syria, Iraq, and parts of Russia. Eventually it fizzled out, perhaps stopped or slowed by a cold winter in 1824. But the world would not be so lucky for long. A few years later, in 1827, a new pandemic started, at first tracing the westward steps of the first one. From the Middle East, a branch infected parts of Africa. Another branch proceeded through Russia to western Europe and from there to the Americas. This was not the last we would see of cholera.