[Cholera in 1831. Challenges for science and the federal government]

The peak of the first great cholera pandemic in 1831 fomented the controversy among contagionists and non-contagionists. In the following year the public debate centered around the correct interpretation of the recent experiences with cholera. The central government of the bureaucratic-absolutist monarchy in Prussia adhered to a firmly contagionist interpretation of the disease and reacted accordingly. Local authorities in Königsberg and Berlin and the bourgeoisie in the merchant city of Danzig, however, stressed the destructive consequences of the cordon system. They considered the results of an interruption in trade and industry to be worse than the damage inflicted by the epidemic. The summer of 1831 demonstrated that cholera could not be stopped by the cordons, but the King's medical advisors nevertheless remained contagionists. Non-contagionists put forward several hypotheses to explain the origin and the spreading of cholera, mainly "miasma" theory and the Hippocratic paradigm of "epidemic constitution". The correlation between poverty and disease, however, was widely noticed. Physicians in the city of Bremen pointed to the necessity of sanitary precautions to be taken in cholera-free periods. On the other hand, many "honest" citizens believed that individuals with a "dissolute" conduct of life were more at risk to contract cholera than others. Instead of costly sanitary policies, the well-to-do classes preferred to identify the defense against cholera with the segregation of unwelcome elements of society. The article is based on hitherto unpublished sources from the former Prussian State Archives at Merseburg, GDR, and the State Archive of the Hanseatic City of Bremen.