Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Cholera Exhibition

When looking for pieces of artwork that involved cholera I came across the New York Historical Society's website. Last April-August they had an exhibit on Cholera called "Plague in Gotham! Cholera in the Nineteenth-Century New York," which focuses on the epidemic that hit in 1832. The groups that were hit hardest were the Irish-Americans African-Americans. The exhibit includes maps of cholera-hit areas, reports from the Board of Health, sketches of cholera victims (alive and dead), and many other interesting pieces of history.

If you weren't lucky enough to be in New York at the time, you can check out the blog they made. It has some of the sketches, articles, and maps from the exhibit. One particularly interesting entry was about an article from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle 1849 about children who would "play cholera."





1 comment:

John Latto said...

Ha ha. Morbid little scamps....