Life in the Time of Cholera

Tuesday, 30 June 2009 19:00

Some 52,000 immigrants, mostly destitute Irish, arrived at Quebec in 1832, carrying with them North America's first cholera pandemic. An estimated 9,000 people died of cholera in Lower and Upper Canada. The disease could have been stopped if medical science had then known that it was spread in cholera-contaminated water that people drank, or more rarely, in food they ate. Clean, safe drinking water would have stopped the disease. But it was thought that cholera was spread in the polluted air of early nineteenth century towns. So instead of focusing on clean water, cannons shot blank charges skyward and great fires of tar and rosins were lit in efforts to clean the air.