In the fall of 1892, fear of cholera was pervasive in North America. Ten years into the fifth international cholera epidemic -- that lasted from 1881 to 1896 -- cholera had been raging in the Middle East, India, and Europe, but the disease had yet to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The maritime traffic of immigrants from Europe was continuous, and each migrant ship potentially carried the disease. Doctors, government officials, and politicians were not asking 'will cholera come?', but rather when. While no one got sick or died of cholera in the city of Toronto in 1892, the crisis and fear of imminent cholera was very real. Drawing on archival research, this dissertation maps how a cholera crisis was shaped by urgency, immediacy, and speculation on the future. My argument will show how the geography of an epidemic is not limited to the presence of a disease. If crises are times of profound activity, how does this event need to be substantiated in order to produce change? This dissertation follows how cholera was integral to producing an object called proliferating life that held together: migrating populations, growing cities, and degeneration; marshland as the source of disease; the medical theory of zymosis that explained how disease outbreaks got out of control; and Malthusian 'laws' of population. Health experts used correlation and synecdoche to visualize these relations. However, these experts needed a stable institutional base to articulate both their fears and their recommendations, which included: professionalized expanding health boards, as social infrastructures; reclaiming Toronto’s marshland of Ashbridge's Bay; and a health ideology built upon the fear of future epidemics, immigration, and a growing economic rationale for health. By the early 20th century, state health became instrumental to a "national vitality", a practice of government intervention that I frame as bureaucratic bio-economy.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/29760 |
| Date | 31 August 2011 |
| Creators | Jackson, Paul |
| Contributors | Prudham, W. Scott |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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