“The unfortunate news of the existence of cholera-morbus” in nineteenth-century Paraíba

Abstract

This text aims to discuss the speeches published in the press and in official documents about the cholera morbus epidemic in Paraíba that occurred in the 1850s. Cholera morbus is an infectious disease, discovered in 1883 by the German physician Robert Koch, caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae and transmitted by water or food. A disease characterized by such symptoms as drowsiness, pallor of the face and lips, contraction and pressure in the stomach, cold hands, a weakened and numb feeling in the fingers, cold feet, and heavy dispositions to diarrhea with watery, greenish stools. This disease caused an epidemic that claimed a large number of lives in Paraíba in the mid-nineteenth century. Methodologically, I use document analysis as a way to investigate in historical sources not only the explicit meanings, but those that were hidden behind the words, the silences, the unsaid. Following the historiographical operation proposed by Michel de Certeau (2008), I selected the documents as a “cultural distribution” in the sense of “producing such documents” and submitting them to criticism, taking into account the social place of their production to create a historical writing. The problematized sources are the speeches contained in the Relatórios de Presidente de Província, in the newspaper A Regeneração and in the texts published in the Revista de Medicina, printed by the Sociedade de Medicina e Cirurgia da Paraíba. It is concluded that despite the lethality of the epidemic, the episode brought to light the medical-hygienic weaknesses in the Province, as well as politically projected some doctors.