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• 1 2020-09-18T16:47:45-04:00 Noticed Pandemics 2 plain 2020-12-14T05:48:19-05:00  

  The story of COVID in the city is analogous in many ways to that of that cholera outbreak nearly 200 years ago. In both there is a rapid spread through the poorest communities, the flight of the wealthy, and an initial (and continued) confusion of government officials leading to skepticism in the general public. In both, New York was among the first cities in the nation to be hit with a new disease, and thus one of the first to start recovering. New York now, though, is much more willing to cooperate with medical advice. Every shop requires a mask, (almost) every pedestrian willingly uses one. Perhaps much of this can be attributed to the sheer speed with which information and instruction can be disseminated to the people, but the iconography and language with which this is done has also changed much in the past 200 years.

  This motivated me to at first compare the public service posters surrounding the cholera outbreak of 1832 to those of the current pandemic, localized in New York City. I had trouble accessing the aforementioned posters from 1832, so I adapted my project to be a pair of posters, one regarding COVID in the style of 1832, and one of cholera in a modern style. This contrasts the attitude of medical experts from then and now in informing the public. The styling of the posters themselves also contribute to the conclusions we draw from them. The rigid, segmented style of modern informational graphics is now so strongly associated with public health announcements that it forms a sort of ethos by itself. In comparison, the mismatched typefaces and disjointed plain text of the cholera notices appear amateurish and therefore less trustworthy. 

  A part of this comes from the wording of the old posters themselves. The writings are proclamations, as if calling the populace to arms. Cholera is seen as an invading force, one from which the city needs to defend itself. The citywide effort to end the epidemic was therefore akin to a national one in preparing for war. There is no questioning in the notice. The actions for the common resident to take are straightforward orders, coming directly from the mayor. One must abstain from certain drinks, must not sleep in a certain way -- there is not even a consideration of a discourse between the officials and the civilians. Contemporary newspapers described the flight from the city as an air of “desertion”, an abandonment of the posts of the wealthy. The honorable upper class should, as Bertha von Suttner described in “Die Waffen nieder!”, should remain, so as to not “abandon [...] the inhabitants of the village in their danger”. This sentiment from the continent was thus present in the young States as well.  To this end, the imagery surrounding cholera was grotesque, showing victims of the disease turned bright blue with faces contorted by pain.
  This depiction of the city’s own people being turned monstrous by the plague mirrors the caricature of wartime enemies in nationalistic cartoon across history, though it is more intimate, more concerning from the victimization of the artists’ own neighbors.

   

  In contrast, modern public health announcements begin by answering questions an individual might have. There are orders to protect oneself, but these are tempered by further explanation. “What are the symptoms?”, one might wonder, or “How does this disease spread?”, and the poster will gladly inform. Public health is, and is forced to be from the intervening centuries of distrust of medicine, a dialogue. The patient as well as the doctor must be an active member. Illness is still explained through metaphor, but is not uniquely defined by one, as outbreaks were war before. 

  Through the mixing of these stylistic elements with the wording of the notices themselves, we see a closer connection between the two -- and thus we find further parallels between the two epidemics. At the same time, we see through changes in design and discourse the forced evolution of the relationship between physician and patient, and the narrative of a city’s struggle against a pandemic changing from a war to that of a collective’s mutual responsibility.

  
  
  
  
   

  Citations:

   

  “Choleric Confusion.” Knowledge in the Time of Cholera: the Struggle over American Medicine in the Nineteenth Century, by Owen Whooley, Univ. of Chicago Press, 2013.

  New-York Evening Post, 13 Aug. 1832, pp. 2–2.

  “PLAGUE in GOTHAM! Cholera in Nineteenth-Century New York.” PLAGUE in GOTHAM Cholera in Nineteenth Century New York, cholerablog.nyhistory.org/.

  Wilford, John Noble. “How Epidemics Helped Shape the Modern Metropolis.” The New York Times, 15 Apr. 2008.

  Suttner, Bertha von. Lay Down Your Arms! 1892.