Hitching a Ride: Cholera, the Canal, and Quarantine

Abstract

Returning by ship from the hajj in 1902, Aida and Fatma landed at the quarantine station of El Tor, 120 miles south of the city of Suez in the Sinai Peninsula.1 The El Tor station had been set up in the Egyptian town following international sanitary conferences convened to promote international standards for sanitary protections to safeguard Europe from “Asiatic” diseases, most notably cholera. Endemic in India for centuries, cholera had spread out of the Ganges basin in the nineteenth century through globalizing networks of trade and steam transport. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, with its shortening of travel times and distances, increased the danger of epidemics turning into pandemics. Although pathways of the cholera pathogen included routes across the Eurasian steppe and Russia into Germany, European authorities focused on the hajj as the catalyst for diffusion of the disease—a super-spreader event. El Tor was meant to be the linchpin in the system of stopping disease from passing through the Suez Canal to Europe.2