PLAGUE in GOTHAM! Cholera in Nineteenth-Century New York (review)

Cholera sparked dread in nineteenth-century cities not just because of how many victims it claimed—mortality rates from tuberculosis and other diseases greatly exceeded those from cholera—but because of the violence and surprise with which it attacked. In a matter of hours, spasms of cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea would transform an apparently healthy person into a pinched and darkened corpse.

The New-York Historical Society's exhibition "PLAGUE in GOTHAM! Cholera in Nineteenth-Century New York" succinctly conveys this terrifying aspect of cholera. Near the center of the exhibit, a large cluster of slate-faced cholera victims stares out at the viewer, eyes rolled back, mouths ajar, and necks contorted in agony. These realistic illustrations, published by Horatio Bartley from drawings made at the Rivington Street Hospital during the city's first cholera epidemic in 1832, derive additional impact from the accompanying captions identifying the patients only by their initials and fate (i.e., M. M., died), and describing the heroic but likely painful and ineffective treatments applied to them ("sinapisms to the abdomen").

Juxtaposed to this gallery of ghouls, co-curators Stephen Edidin and Joseph Ditta have cleverly placed a lavish gilt-framed scene of bucolic bounty and childhood innocence, painted by the Hudson River School artist Asher P. Durand. In the scene, Durand's rosy-cheeked children stand under the shade of a sturdy tree trunk in the nearby Eden of New Jersey. Durand painted this lush scene in the summer of 1832, soon after he fled Manhattan with his family to escape the disease. Better than any declarative statement, the contrast between these healthy, well-dressed children and the contorted countenances of the hospital's cholera patients illustrates how the disease divided New Yorkers by class. Those with wealth fled the city, leaving the epidemic to strike the poor. Although the microbial etiology of cholera would not be discovered until 1883, it soon became apparent that the disease flourished among the crowded and dirty conditions of the Five Points neighborhood (pictured in the exhibition), a downtown area populated by Irish and African American residents. At the time, the upper classes possessed little sympathy for the plight of the cholera-stricken poor. John Pintard, a prominent merchant and the founder of the New-York Historical Society, thanked God that the disease had been "almost exclusively confined to the lower classes of intemperate, dissolute & filthy people huddled together like swine in their polluted habitations," a caption informs viewers. Pintard, in a portrait included in the exhibition, holds a Bible open to the ninetieth Psalm, which refers to the power of the wrathful God to "sweep men away in the sleep of death." In 1832, wealthy but pious New Yorkers like Pintard could take refuge in their Bibles, as cholera struck few among their number. But in subsequent epidemics, it would become more difficult to maintain such a distinction.

While the exhibit does a fine job of illuminating the experience of cholera in 1832 New York for a general audience, those who have read Charles Rosenberg's classic work The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (University of Chicago Press: 1962, 1987), will find the exhibit incomplete. Aside from a small document indicating that by 1849, doctors had lost confidence in the treatments applied in 1832, the exhibit does not provide a sense of the disease's persistence or of how New Yorkers of different eras coped with it differently.

The exhibit, confined to the back wall of a crowded portrait gallery, also could have benefitted from a more prominent and larger space, as well as a more careful graphic presentation. The map of New York during the 1832 epidemic included in the exhibition does not compare favorably to similar maps in the society's other exhibits, and the typeface used in captions does not make for easy reading. Somewhat compensating for this presentation, however, is the exhibit blog. Though more...