From the perspective of eagle-eyed retrospection it is clear that when, during the early 1820s in Russia and then in western Europe a decade later, cholera first arrived in Europe, no one had any idea what had struck. Here was a disease that hit with astonishing ferocity, terrifying like only the plague and yellow fever before it, making its way from its origins in India by leaps and bounds along the main routes of commercial intercourse in an imprecise, yet identifiably northwesterly movement. And yet, it was a disease whose fundamental nature was long to remain concealed from even the most ardently attentive observers, a disease, as one German put it, “die wir wol nennen, aber nicht kennen.”

Ignorant of cholera's basic characteristics, medical expertise betrayed its helplessness in a luxuriant polymorphousness of preventive recommendations and cures, ranging from the harmless (steambaths, veils, fresh water, acupuncture, rubbings) to the gruesome: dousings with ice water, rectal injections of turpentine, extraction via pumps of inhaled miasma from the innards, cauterization of the stomach skin with boiling water and endless bleedings, which in the dehydration of the disease and its attendant coagulation, meant that blood had to be practically squeezed from the veins when it could be extruded at all. That homeopaths seized the opportunity to press their cause at least did little harm. Dr. Strack of Augsburg, convinced that different cloths and colors absorbed varying quantities of miasma, recommended white linen over black silk for the worried vain.