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The “Cholera Cloud” in the Nineteenth-Century “British World”: History of an Object-Without-an-Essence
- Bulletin of the History of Medicine
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 86, Number 3, Fall 2012
- pp. 303-332
- 10.1353/bhm.2012.0050
- Article
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The “cholera cloud” is one of the most persistent presences in the archives of nineteenth-century cholera in the “British World.” Yet it has seldom received anything more than a passing acknowledgment from historians of cholera. Tracing the history of the cholera cloud as an object promises to open up a new dimension of the historically contingent experience of cholera, as well as make a significant contribution to the emergent literature on “thing theory.” By conceptualizing the cholera cloud as an object-without-an-essence, this article demonstrates how global cholera pandemics in the nineteenth century produced globalized objects in which a near-universal recognizability and an utterly context-specific set of meanings, visions, and realities could ironically cohabit.