Every Cure Comes with a Price – Michelle Moy

News of a rampant disease was spreading from country to country, issuing a state of disbelief and worry. A chain of questions and answers spiraled out of cholera, and it alerted places worldwide that public health needed greater attention.

Cholera could not be restrained, being that it could attack in any season whether cold or hot. Industrialization had been under way, and public health had not yet accommodated for this new change in society; thereby leaving the perfect, filthy environment for cholera to spread its deathly wings. Its victims would be laid to rest within 24 hours, sometimes less. People worldwide were desperate to know whom this disease would claim as its prey, and how they could best protect themselves.

The Cholera Years by Rosenberg provides a number of theories that developed in New York alone, before and after cholera had even struck. Americans were rather confident that they would be impervious to the disease. They believed that none of its people were as inclined to get ill in comparison to those residing in the slums of Europe. America was a democracy populated with the freest people across the globe, and therefore, they were also supposedly the freest from disease. However, New Yorkers all agreed that the city was filthy, and they were in dire need of a substantial water supply to clean it up. The Atlantic would provide enough time for them to make a cleanly and unlivable environment for cholera’s arrival, or so they thought. Quarantine was issued and the streets were cleaned, similar to the measures taken by France to prevent the outbreak of cholera. And like France, this wasn’t enough to keep cholera from targeting America.

People now said that God deliberately plagued sinners, in an attempt to rid the human population of these people in particular. Authorities were recommending that people engage in prayer to prevent cholera, so this would inevitably bring up the political issue of separation of church and state. However, why would God help those who only sought him when they were in need? This reflects the lack of preventative measures in society, which in turn drew people without true faith to the “highest” power for any sort of help. In addition, the poor and the immigrants were deemed more likely to get ill. Statistics would prove this theory true, but it wasn’t those peoples’ natural tendency to get ill, but it was the poor conditions in which they were living. Filthy, crowded, and unable to run to rural areas, the odds were against the poor and the immigrants.

After all the struggle and devastation presented by Rosenberg’s narrative, Cholera Can Be Conquered progressively illustrates the movement toward the cure of cholera. For the first time ever, blood plasma was injected into humans. In addition to the discovery of the beneficial effect of sulfadiazine in terms of the disease, cholera was finally, after ten years, no longer a threat to America.

Cholera was an epidemic that revisited more than once in the nineteenth century, and medical professionals along with average people endlessly searched for a cure, some-one/thing to blame, preventative methods, anything. In contrast, Colgrove in Epidemic City offers a description of the new “cure” for narcotic abuse, methadone, and all the controversy that emerged from it in the 1960’s. So decades later, we have the solution to a problem and yet we still have more conflicts to solve. The main problem was whether drug abuse should be considered a crime or an illness. The government did not know how to adequately address this issue without first deciphering how to categorize it. Communities feared that Newman’s expansion of the methadone programs would promote drug use even more, and that their neighborhoods would suffer from it. In essence, whether we’re talking about the past or the present, or about an intestinal disease or an addiction, it all comes down to the fact that public health issues affect everything: politics, lifestyles, mentalities, and people.