Christopher Hamlin, Cholera: The Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. 256. pound12.99. ISBN: 978-0-19-954624-4.

摘要

Cholera: The Biography is one of the several biographies of disease recently published as part of an Oxford University Press series aimed at a broader audience. Christopher Hamlin was the obvious choice as the author-of this volume:-it is-hard-to-think of any living historian better-versed in the intellectual and social contexts in which cholera has robbed so many millions of lives. Hamlin divides this exceptionally learned and broad-ranging book into six sections. Section one examines the ways in which European physicians tried to distinguish between the old non-epidemic form of cholera and what they came to call epidemic 'Asiatic' cholera. Hamlin argues that the evidence for a Bengali origin for cholera, based as it is largely on nineteenth-century medical accounts which were steeped in views of India as mired in filth and native misery, is actually quite flimsy. Section two focuses on the cultural response to cholera: the intertwining of ideas about and responses to the disease with prevailing religious and moral sensibilities. Section three examines the systematic responses elicited by later epidemics. Hamlin explores the complex links between medical reactions to cholera and the different kinds of nineteenth-century state: from autocratic Russia to liberal England. Each nation, Hamlin shows, had its own protocols and prejudices. The typically vigilant response of South American port cities, for instance, contrasted sharply with the British resistance to quarantine measures which might slow the speed at which goods and troops travelled from and to imperial India. Section four examines the confusions about the nature, cause and optimal responses to a disease which defied a straightforward explanation, even after the bacteriological investigations of Robert Koch and his team. Hamlin neatly delineates the rival positions of con-tagionists and different varieties of anti-contagionists. He shows in fascinating detail the irresistible urge of cholera authors to ext...