The 1866 New York City cholera epidemic through popular periodicals and theories of contagion

Abstract

In 1866 cholera struck New York City for the third time in the nineteenth century; previous epidemics occurred in 1832 and 1849. With a population of over 1.1 million, one fourth of whom were immigrants, the city was starkly divided between New York City’s traditional elite class and predominantly Irish immigrants and African Americans living in the city’s most neglected quarters, which became the main sites for contagion. In this essay, I discuss the periodical coverage of the epidemic in multiple “literary” genres that were part of the news cycle of the time, a topic that has been relatively unexplored. Through news columns, prose, and narrative poems, some of the city’s leading newspapers and story papers circulated the discourse of popular science. These periodicals featured cross-genre works that merged traditional wind poetry with miasma theory, generating coverage that was both entertaining and informative.