Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- Glossary of Italian and Neapolitan term
- Introduction
- PART I SANITARY ANXIETIES
- PART II THE PUBLIC EPIDEMIC OF 1884
- 2 From Provence to the Bay of Naples
- 3 Death in Naples, 1884
- 4 Survival and recovery
- PART III RISANAMENTO AND MIASMA
- PART IV THE SECRET EPIDEMIC OF 1910–1911
- Conclusion: Neapolitan cholera and Italian politics
- Appendix
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
4 - Survival and recovery
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- Glossary of Italian and Neapolitan term
- Introduction
- PART I SANITARY ANXIETIES
- PART II THE PUBLIC EPIDEMIC OF 1884
- 2 From Provence to the Bay of Naples
- 3 Death in Naples, 1884
- 4 Survival and recovery
- PART III RISANAMENTO AND MIASMA
- PART IV THE SECRET EPIDEMIC OF 1910–1911
- Conclusion: Neapolitan cholera and Italian politics
- Appendix
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
ALTERNATIVE MEANS OF PALLIATION
Despite so great an ordeal, Naples survived. The plan developed by the municipal giunta lay in ruins, but the city nevertheless weathered the crisis. Part of the explanation for this endurance was a feature of the disease itself – one of the great ‘cholera mysteries’ that characterize the history of this exotic pestilence. For reasons still insufficiently understood, epidemic cholera is self-limiting. Thus in Naples the epidemic began by rapidly and violently destroying those individuals who were most at risk. It then began slowly to subside after the catharsis of mid-September. The circle of its victims narrowed, and the rate of mortality declined. By the end of September it no longer appeared that the city was being inexorably annihilated. The medical crisis was slowly abating. In October the daily bills of mortality were almost comforting, so marked was the contrast with the preceding weeks. Figures that, in August, would have created panic, brought relief after the experience of September. Although the outburst continued into early November, the official daily number of deaths never again climbed as high as ninety. There began instead a slow descent into single digits.
Imperceptibly, tensions in the city followed the downward curve of mortality. With fewer cases a day, conflicts became less frequent, the hospital service improved, the cemetery kept pace with the smaller number of cadavers, and scenes of horror grew steadily rarer. Terror itself began to subside.
The Crosses – White and Red
The spontaneous decline of the epidemic force of the disease, however, is only one aspect of the gradual return to near-normality that occurred in October.
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- Naples in the Time of Cholera, 1884–1911 , pp. 155 - 178Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995