Cholera Cemetery

Some years ago, in my very short teaching career, i assigned to the high school science classes a book to read. I did not think much of the education courses i took at university. One point that some classmates brought up was, that, every class should be a reading class. I taught in a very strange school, with a very different pupil population. I would describe it as teaching at the nut house, or having the emotionally disturbed children of financially gifted parents. I was not happy. I saw the children of the bourgeois, and the assumptions of their relatives, and i felt how one could be contemptuous towards them.

Curriculum courses were not helpful. What i needed was abnormal psychology, aberrant psychology. I took one class in educational psychology, that was insufficient. It has been many years, i think one course was abnormal psychology, but it was forensic.

Well these students did not do well with textbooks, so i had them read well written books by scientists. I had one class read, King Solomon's Ring by Konrad Lorenz; one class read, The Panda's Thumb by Stephen Jay Gould; one class read, The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson; and here is where i got in to trouble, the one class, Rats, Lice, and History by Hans Zinsser. [i made the mistake of lending that book, it had all my notes written on the margins, i have not seen that book in 25 years] Unfortunately, i think i would get in trouble to-day, on account of the increased, and militant stupidity. Carson is anathema to the chemical companies and, therefore Republicans. Gould was a propagandist for evolution, and privately an atheist. They were all good writers, teachers, and scientists; but that is not important to idjits and teabaggers, if anything it is grounds for attack.

Zinsser's book was objected to because of its title. It also dealt with the germ theory of disease. Now, we are living with politically active, and vengeful people who deny science (and history). These people were not on that bandwagon, then. During the course of the XIXth century there were several pandemics of cholera. John Snow studied the locations of death in London, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera. First in 1849, and a second edition in 1855 (with an appendix for the 1854 epidemic). Snow did not believe disease was caused by bad air (miasma). He found it was by bad water. The Broad Street Water Pump was killing people in 1854. It was three feet from a cesspool.

A few years later [1861] Louis Pasteur (and some others) formalised the germ theory of disease. Certain micro-organisms caused disease. Many people did not believe that then [some do not now]. Cholera is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, which produces a toxin that infects the intestine, which pumps out diarrhoea in such volume, that death occurs within the day.

Cholera, for centuries or millennia, was restricted to Bengal. In the XIXth century it travelled, by land and sea. A ship flying a yellow flag was giving signal cholera was aboard. Port cities were very susceptible. The United States was first visited by cholera in 1832. In 1849 Cincinnati had 8,000 deaths, and many people abandoned the city. Ohio's first State Fair was cancelled. James Polk had just finished his presidency, he died of cholera on 15 June 1849 in Nashville, Tennessee.

Sandusky, Ohio was a port town. They have a cholera cemetery, it is not the only one in Ohio; but in may be the biggest in the country. The cholera was active in Sandusky from 1 July to 7 September 1849. As the state plaque [Erie County loves plaques, there are state markers, county plaques, organisational plaques, and so on; the density based on population is very high] reads, “Of the city's 5667 people in 1849, 3500 fled, and 400 of those remaining were victims of cholera. Most are buried here...The scourge came again in 1850 and 1852...” The numbers on the monument are different, and slightly vaguer.

The cemetery was immediately neglected, and abused variously. In 1924 it was rehabilitated, and a bronze pillar monument erected. The park is just west of the center of town, in a run down neighborhood.

Besides, the state marker, and monument, there are two high birdhouses, several trees and three military stones for Revolutionary War veterans, all with the surname, Ransom. Two are Connecticut veterans [Sandusky was a part of Connecticut's Western Reserve]. Two of them died on 3 November 1840. There are no current stones for anyone else. Yet, other pre-cholera burials took place, including that of a one term Democratic congressman, William Hunter.