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Hitching a Ride: Cholera, the Canal, and Quarantine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2023

Beth Baron Open the ORCID record for Beth Baron [Opens in a new window]
Beth Baron*
Affiliation:
Department of History, The City College and Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA
*
Email: bbaron@gc.cuny.edu
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Extract

Returning by ship from the hajj in 1902, Aida and Fatma landed at the quarantine station of El Tor, 120 miles south of the city of Suez in the Sinai Peninsula.1 The El Tor station had been set up in the Egyptian town following international sanitary conferences convened to promote international standards for sanitary protections to safeguard Europe from “Asiatic” diseases, most notably cholera. Endemic in India for centuries, cholera had spread out of the Ganges basin in the nineteenth century through globalizing networks of trade and steam transport. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, with its shortening of travel times and distances, increased the danger of epidemics turning into pandemics. Although pathways of the cholera pathogen included routes across the Eurasian steppe and Russia into Germany, European authorities focused on the hajj as the catalyst for diffusion of the disease—a super-spreader event. El Tor was meant to be the linchpin in the system of stopping disease from passing through the Suez Canal to Europe.2

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , November 2022 , pp. 747 - 752
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Crendiropoulo, Milton and Sheldon Amos, Miss B., “On Agglutination of Vibrios,” Journal of Pathology and Bacteriology 9 (1904): 261CrossRefGoogle Scholar; M. Crediropoulo and Cornelia B. Sheldon Amos, “Further Observations on the Influence of Calcium Choloride on the Agglutination of Vibrios,” The Lancet (22 December 1906): 1722–23.

2 Huber, Valeska, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869-1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For background on cholera, see Echenberg, Myron, Africa in the Age of Cholera: A History of Pandemics from 1817 to the Present (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Snowden, Frank M., Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), ch 13Google Scholar; and Watts, Sheldon, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), ch 5Google Scholar.

3 Al-Ahram (3 April 1902): 1; Long, John G., “The Quarantine Camp at El Tor,” Public Health Reports (1896–1970), vol. 17, no. 20 (16 May 1902): 1156–59Google Scholar. As US agent and consul-general for the US in Egypt, Long wrote to inform the assistant secretary of state of the cholera outbreak at El Tor, drawing closely from the description of the procedures in al-Ahram or a translation of it; the US did not have a representative on the International Sanitary Board. See also Marc Armand Ruffer, “Measures Taken at Tor and Suez against Ships Coming from the Red Sea and the Far East,” The Lancet, paper read 15 December 1899: 31–35.

4 Crendiropoulo and Amos, “On Agglutination of Vibrios,” 261; Crediropoulo and Amos, “Further Observations”; and Ruffer, “Measures Taken at Tor.”

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6 Wellcome Institute, Private Papers (PP), Elgood (ELG), A2, Maurice Amos's Memoir, 107; PP/ELG/D3.

7 Ruffer, “Measures Taken at Tor,” 31–32.

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11 Abul-Magd, Zeinab, Imagined Empires: A History of Revolt in Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), 137–39Google Scholar; Abul-Magd, Zeinab, “Rebellion in the Time of Cholera: Failed Empire, Unfinished Nation in Egypt, 1840–1920,” Journal of World History 21, no. 4 (2010): 691–719CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Miss Sheldon Amos, “A Critical Review of Recent Work on the Etiology and Pathology of Dysentery,” The Journal of Pathology and Bacteriology (September 1902): 366.

13 Ibid., 366–67.

14 C.B. Sheldon Amos, “A Note on the Treatment of Catarrhal and Gangrenous Dysentery,” The Lancet, 4 August 1906: 295–96.

15 Crendiropoulo and Amos, “On Agglutination of Vibrios.” In their first paper, published in the Journal of Pathology and Bacteriology, Elgood and Crendiropoulo looked at the action of various salts on cholera vibrios isolated from patients such as Aida and Fatma, concluding, among other things, that several groups of vibrios are found in cholera patients and while some salts cause agglutination, others do not, but agglutination cannot occur in the absence of salt.

16 Crediropoulo and Amos, “Further Observations.”

17 Ibid.; F. Goldschlich, Vibrions Cholèriques isolés au campement de Tor. Retour du pèlerinage de l'année 1905. Rapport adressé au president du Conseil quarantenaire d'Egypte, 1 brochure de 10 p., Alexandrie, 1905 in Bulletin de l'Institut Pasteur (1905): 726–27.

18 Claude Chastel, “Le centenaire de la decouverte du vibrion d'El Tor”; Echenberg, Africa in the Time of Cholera.

19 Tagliacozzoo, Eric, “Hajj in the Time of Cholera,” in Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print, eds. Gelvin, James and Green, Nile (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), 103–20Google Scholar; Personal email communication from Eric Tagliacozzoo, 5 May 2022.