Cholera Epidemics Spread Alongside Typhus and Louse-Borne Diseases in 19th Century Europe
Poet involved
What happened
The cholera pandemics that swept Europe in the 1830s and 1840s struck populations already debilitated by periodic typhus epidemics spread by body lice among the urban poor. In the cramped, insanitary slums of industrial-era London, Paris, Dublin, and other cities, lice infestation was endemic, and the conditions that bred lice also facilitated the spread of waterborne cholera. The combined burden of these epidemics on the working class produced enormous social and political pressure for sanitary reform.
Literary impact
The epidemic diseases of the 1830s and 1840s profoundly shaped Romantic and early Victorian literature. Heinrich Heine watched cholera arrive in Paris in 1832 and wrote about it with horrified fascination. Keats had died of tuberculosis in 1821 in a disease-haunted world that also knew typhus and cholera. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's social protest poems engaged with the conditions of the urban poor that made lice, cholera, and typhus companions of poverty. The intersection of epidemic disease and social conscience drove much of the most important Victorian poetry.
Source: Wikipedia
