The Gozo committee of health minutes during the cholera epidemic of 1837

Abstract

In the seventeenth century frequent pandemics of bubonic plague ravaged the populations of Europe, North Africa and Asia as far as China (Hays, 2005: 103; Brook, 1999: 163), while the nineteenth century world was tormented with wave after wave of cholera pandemics. The relative ease of population mobility across the vast empires in the dawn of the nineteenth century led to spread of diseases across continents and by 1817, cholera left the banks of the Ganges delta to reach Europe and the Americas. The first cholera pandemic started in Jessore, India in July 1817, appeared in Calcutta by September and reached Madras the following summer. After ten years of sowing death in Asia, cholera moved into Europe, affecting Russia in 1830, the United Kingdom in 1831, Marseille in 1835 and Naples and Sicily in the spring of 1837 (Figure 1). By the summer of the same year, it had reached the Maltese shores, having already massacred 62 million people.