D D Cunningham and the aetiology of cholera in British India, 1869-1897.

Cholera in the nineteenth century has proved an enduring topic for historians. In 1961 Asa Briggs called for analysis of cholera as an under-utilized yet potentially powerful tool for the emerging discipline of social history.2 Researchers in the field responded with a plethora of works on this most brutal of epidemic diseases. Despite methodological and interpretative differences, the literature has until recently been dominated by accounts of cholera in Europe and North America.3 The discovery by the German bacteriologist Robert Koch (1843-1910) of the cholera bacillus in Calcutta in 1884 is one of the central events in the history of cholera, yet Western historians have been slow to discuss the Indian cholera story in any depth. Only recently have medical historians such as David Arnold and Mark Harrison begun reconstructing the role of India and Anglo-Indians in the world-wide discourse generated by epidemic diseases including cholera.4 The object of this study is to investigate further the Indian cholera story, before and after Koch's discovery of the cholera vibrio. My focus is David Douglas Cunningham (1843-1914), a Scottish doctor in the Indian Medical Service, who from 1869 to 1897 was a scientific assistant to the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India. Working