Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 43, number 3, spring, 1960

              DISEASE AND SICKNESS ON THE WISCONSIN
By Peter T. Harstad
FRONTIERt CHOLERA
A MONG the many maladies afflicting the set- -^^ tiers of early Wisconsin, the two most troublesome and generally feared were malaria and cholera. Both produced disturbing effects on a populace ignorant of their causes; yet each disease was peculiar in its inception and duration. On the one hand, all that was needed for malaria to spread was that an anopholes mosquito carry a minute organism from one human to another, a process as easily accom¬ plished in an isolated cabin as in a military garrison or a frontier town. Although malaria seldom brought a high mortality rate, it often left its victims ill for months or even years.
On the other hand, cholera, which was spread mainly through the consumption of in¬ fected food or water, thrived in a dense popu¬ lation and left a high mortality in its wake even though a victim, if he survived the first few days of an attack, could usually expect a full recovery. What made cholera so terrifying was the swiftness and decisiveness with which it struck. One evening in July, 1852, the editor of a Madison newspaper saw Edward Fisher, one of the town's leading citizens, walking down the street in his usual robust health; the next day he reported Fisher's death in his paper. In Milwaukee, two gentlemen stood on a street corner discussing the progress of chol¬ era in the city. Within two hours one was dead and his body on the way to the cemetery. In Galena, during August of 1850, fifty persons who were in complete health on a Sunday morning were in their graves Tuesday eve¬ ning.* The unlimited stories of horrid death that circulated during the cholera years caused frightening thoughts in the minds of everyone.
Throughout the centuries cholera has been regarded as a mysterious and dangerous dis¬ ease—an attitude shared by the pioneer resi¬ dents of Wisconsin who generally attributed its indirect cause to "Providence," a word which appeared often in the newspapers when the plague approached. An Indian agent dur¬ ing the Black Hawk War called it "The Scourg¬ ing hand of an Almighty Providence." Reve¬ rend John H. Ragatz, a circuit-riding minister in the western part of the state, prayed God during the epidemic of 1849 to have mercy on the nation "although we have deserved punish¬ ment, for one must fear that thousands die as a result of the plague without being prepared for it. When we see the godlessness which is in vogue everywhere, we must not be surprised if God manifests his judgment and destroys whole nations through war, hunger, and pestilence."^
rpEE SYMPTOMS of the disease were graph- -*- ically described in a pamphlet. The Chol¬ era Beacon, written by Dr. Flam Stimson, a Dartmouth graduate, and circulated in Amer¬ ica after the epidemic of 1832. In it Stimson stated that prior to the outbreak of an epi-
' Daily Argus and Democrat, Madison, July 28, 1852; Frank A. Flower, History of Milwaukee, Wis¬ consin (Chicago, 1881), 400; Prairie du Chien Patriot, September 4, 1850. For a general account of the cholera epidemics of the United States see J. S. Chambers, The Conquest of Cholera (New York, 1938).
^ "Papers of Indian Agent Boyd—1832," in Wiscon¬ sin State Historical Society Collections, 12:278 (Madi¬ son, 1892) ; Lowell F. Ragatz, trans., "A Circuit Rider in the Old Northwest: Letters of the Reverend John H. Ragatz," in the Wisconsin Magazine of His¬ tory, 7:98 (Madison, 1923).
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