In the 1830s, cholera spread rapidly around the globe, moving along trade routes. Frederich Engels described the approach of the acute bacterial infection to Manchester as ‘a universal terror seizing bourgeoisie of the city’. Something was coming.
By June 1832, cholera was with the people of Manchester, but so was the promise of a new kind of democracy. The surgeon Samuel Gaskell, Esq. makes the observation that:
‘On the 9th of August the working classes were allowed a general holiday to celebrate the passing of the Reform Bill; this led to much intoxication and exposure to night air. In a few days after this holiday the number of cases became greatly augmented.’
Gaskell attributes the swift and fatal spread of the illness upon the pauper body to public revelry. Here was evidence of social ineptitude, overexposure, inattention, rather than, as Engels himself argued, the cramped tenement conditions in which the working classes lived and worked, in an increasingly industrial world.
When is public space dangerous? And for whom? What spreads, and what halts the passing of a thing, mouth to mouth, hand to hand, chest to chest?
These questions are not easily answered. Where once stood a workhouse now stands a poorly-lit designer boutique: elongated grey plastic mannequins display urbanely shredded clothes, price available upon request...
The 1832 Reform Act coincided with the introduction of the Anatomy Act. The state’s response to the cholera epidemic seemed to typify the elites’ attitudes to the value of the working classes, upon whom the burden of the infection rested. Middle class cholera victims were treated at home, but working class victims were transported to cholera hospitals by cart, where visitors were banned.
2 September, 1832. A crowd of three thousand protesters gathered in the streets. A four-year-old boy had entered the hospital alive. Later, he was dead, buried. The boy’s grandfather was suspicious. He insisted on inspecting the contents of the coffin. Where the boy’s head should have been there was a brick. The boy, claimed protesters, had been ‘burked’ by surgeons who wanted his body for dissection.
To burke is to murder by smothering, for sale onto a black market that traded in corpses. To extinguish, covertly, without leaving any marks upon the victim’s body.
The crowd surged, carrying the boy’s headless body, through the main streets of Manchester to attack the cholera hospital on Swan Street. Police with cutlasses could not disperse the riots. Protesters smashed through windows and tore down the hospital wall.
