Description
In 1892, the German city of Hamburg was struck by an epidemic of cholera that killed nearly 10,000 people, capping a series of Cholera epidemics plaguing the liberal, bourgeois trading city. Piecing together the causes of the epidemic, Evans (modern history, Cambridge U., UK) points to the prevailing inequities of the city's social order and the laissez faire ideology of the city's government, which condemned the working poor to suffer under miserable living conditions ripe for a public health disaster. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Read More
"A tremendous book, the biography of a city which charts the multifarious pathways from bacilli to burgomaster." - Roy Porter, London Review of BooksWhy were nearly 10,000 people killed in six weeks in Hamburg, while most of Europe was left almost unscathed? As Richard J. Evans explains, it was largely because the town was a “free city” within Germany that was governed by the “English” ideals of laissez-faire. The absence of an effective public-health policy combined with ill-founded medical theories and the miserable living conditions of the poor to create a scene ripe for tragedy. The story of the “cholera years” is, in Richard Evans’s hands, tragically revealing of the age’s social inequalities and governmental pitilessness and incompetence; it also offers disquieting parallels with the world’s public-health landscape today, including the current coronavirus crisis.
Read Less