Cholera, quarantine and the English preventive system, 1850-1895.

Cholera is popularly remembered as the disease which made the nineteenth century its own, appearing from obscurity to devastate Europe repeatedly in the years between 1830 and the 1920s. Six pandemics spread fear and alarm, terrible illness and horrible death, across the Continent before 1900,1 distorting the true demographic significance of the disease and deflecting both contemporary and historical attention from the indigenous "diseases of society".2 Epidemic cholera had its origins in India; for Europe it was only an invader, as plague had been originally. In its status as invader, and in the magnitude of its geographical range, lay its impact and its influence on nineteenth-century society. More than thirty years ago, Asa Briggs drew attention to the international significance of cholera, and stressed the need for comparative examination of responses to cholera in different countries and in different epidemics.3 Although the disease has since attracted much historical attention, this has been largely concentrated on individual epidemics (notably that of 1830-32), and on contemporary debates about the causes of the disease.4 It is only recently that studies which recognize and stimulate consideration of the wider European cholera experience of the period 1830-1900 have begun to appear, and the later history of the disease in Europe remains largely unexplored.5 Both the pattern of local responses to the later outbreaks, and the processes involved in cholera's gradual withdrawal from the Continent, merit investigation, as does the wider context of the development of