#cholera

[covid-safer-hotties]

Revert to COVID-19 safety protocols to avert cholera spread – Public urged

Professor Samuel Kaba Akoriyea, the Acting Director General, of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), has urged the public to revert to the COVID-

[bethanydelleman]

Me doing research for fan fiction: oh wow cholera is the best it kills people so well! Onset in as little as 2 hours and death within 24!? This is the greatest disease ever! Now let's go slaughter the residents of Middlemarch together, my best new bacterial friend

Also me: I swear I am a normal person who donates to Doctors Without Borders don't put me on a list

[nemfrog]

Death the Strangler, The First Outbreak of Cholera at a Masked Ball in Paris, 1831. Gustav Richard Steinbrecher. 1851. Wood engraving.

Internet Archive

[neat-deadandlive-things]

I guess John Snow knows some things after all.

[jstor]

Explore the world of early bacteriological research with this historical footage from the Wellcome Trust, now available on JSTOR. This short film, dating back to between 1910 and 1919, showcases the movement and agglutination of typhoid and cholera bacilli, providing a rare glimpse into the origins of modern bacteriology. Believed to be one of the earliest surviving film records of this type, it highlights cultures possibly from the Bombay Plague Laboratory (now the Haffkine Institute for Training, Research & Testing). Dive into this unique piece of scientific history. Clip: Bacillus Typhosus (Typhoid and Cholera Bacilli). Wellcome Collection.

[agoodflyting]

Good Omens Historical Trivia That's Haunting Me Today...

So we all know A.Z. Fell & Co is located on the fictitious Whickber Street in Soho and was established in 1800.

Aziraphale has run the shop ever since then and was in contact with Crowley at least until the 1820's when they took their little jaunt to Edinburgh and Crowley got sucked down the tube slide to Hell. They meet up again no later than the 1860's, when Crowley asks for Holy Water.

Stands to reason that between the 1820's and 1860's Aziraphale was in Soho doing Aziraphale things. Running his bookshop. Eating tiny cakes

Yeah... you know what else was going on in Soho during that time?

The worst cholera epidemic in London history.

If you don't know, cholera is a deadly bacterial infection caused by drinking contaminated water. Prior to the 1850's humans weren't really sure what caused cholera, but they knew it was terrifying and also that it was absolutely epidemic in big cities.

TW: this is gross - The main symptoms of cholera are agonizing stomach pain and non-stop watery diarrhea, eventually leading to the skin turning blue due to the thickening of blood from severe dehydration. Patients can lose more than 20% of their body weight in hours as they quite literally evacuate every drop of water in their bodies until they die of heart failure. - OK gross part over

Cholera symptoms show up as short as 5 hours after infection and could kill within as little as 12 hours. Cholera was especially terrifying because of how quickly and painfully it killed you, and because the patient maintained mental clarity up until the point of death. More than half of the people who contracted cholera died within a few days after consuming the bacteria-contaminated water.

And guess what water had cholera bacteria in it?

The public water pump on Broad Street in Soho in August of 1854

And this wasn't one of those epidemics that starts slowly and drags on. It hit like a bomb. It killed 600 Soho residents in ten days.

That's roughly 60 people a day in a 3-4 block area. Most of them died at home because the disease struck too quickly for them to to make it to a hospital. Survivors described hearses stacked with coffins 4-5 high going down the street nonstop all day long during the outbreak. Entire families were wiped out overnight.

What does that have to do with Good Omens?

Aziraphale's book shop was right in the epicenter of this outbreak.

Neil Gaiman has been pretty free about the fact that Whickber Street is a thinly veiled expy of the real Berwick Street in Soho.

This is a famous map showing the 1854 Soho Cholera epidemic. I highlighted Berwick Street and the public water pump that was the center of the contagion. The black bars (I circled a few in blue) on the map designate deaths. The thicker the black bar, the more people died in that particular house.

51 people died the week of the cholera outbreak on Aziraphale's Street alone.

Cholera was one of those diseases that provoked a lot of panic, not just because of how fast and painful it was, but because of the way it didn't follow common conventions about class or age. Children died while the elderly survived (often because the elderly had no one to gather water for them). Lower class houses were spared while their middle class landlords died. Churches were packed that week, because people in Soho had no idea who would get sick next. The epidemic pretty much burned itself out in a week and a half, since by that point everyone who drank the water had already died. I have to wonder what our resident Angel was up to during that time. Obviously cholera can't hurt him, but that's his neighborhood. There's no way hundreds of people, including entire families with children, are dying painfully in his neighborhood and Aziraphale doesn't notice. That means that in between this scene:

And this one:

Aziraphale would have watched one of the worst disease outbreaks in London history play out right outside his front door. I feel like there's great potential for a good story there if anyone better than me wants to write it.

[blob-master]

Posted this on Tiktok, but thought it deserved a place here too. This song reminds me touch of Ghosts it's not even funny. If I watched the other versions of ghosts, I think this edit would be so much better, but nonetheless.

[charnel-grounds]

Otto Seitz (1846–1912), The Black Kitchen of Death

illustration from Jugend #24, 1896