The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire Volume 145: start THE RECORD SOCIETY OF LANCASHIRE AND CHESHIRE FOUNDED TO TRANSCRIBE AND PUBLISH ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS RELATING TO THE TWO COUNTIES VOLUME CXLV The Society wishes to acknowledge with gratitude the support given towards publication by Lancashire County Council © The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire Alan Kidd Terry Wyke ISBN 978 0 902593 80 0 Printed in Great Britain by 4word Ltd, Bristol THE CHALLENGE OF CHOLERA: PROCEEDINGS OF THE MANCHESTER SPECIAL BOARD OF HEALTH 1831-1833 Edited by Alan Kidd and Terry Wyke PRINTED FOR THE SOCIETY 2010 FOR THE SUBSCRIPTION YEAR 2008 COUNCIL AND OFFICERS FOR THE YEAR 2008 President J.R.H. Pepler, M.A., D.A.A., c/o Cheshire Record Office, Duke Street, Chester CHI 1RL Hon. Council Secretary Dorothy J. Clayton, M.A., Ph.D., A.L.A., F.R.Hist.S., c/o John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PP Hon. Membership Secretary J.C. Sutton, M.A., F.R.I.C.S., 5 Beechwood Drive, Alsager, Cheshire, ST7 2HG Hon. Treasurer and Publications Secretary Fiona Pogson, B.A., Ph.D., c/o Department of History, Liverpool Hope University, Hope Park, Liverpool L16 9JD Hon. General Editor Peter McNiven, M.A., Ph.D., F.R.Hist.S., 105 Homegower House, St Helens Road, Swansea SA1 4DN Other Members of the Council P.H.W. Booth, M.A., F.R.Hist.S. C.B. Phillips, B.A., Ph.D. Diana E.S. Dunn, B.A., D.Ar.Studies B.W. Quintrell, M.A., Ph.D., F.R.Hist.S. .R.V. Heale, B.A., M.Phil., Ph.D. D. Szechi, B.A., D.Phil., F.R.Hist.S. Jackson, M.A., D.A.A. TJ. Thornton, M.A., D.Phil. CONTENTS Preface vii Introduction ix Editorial Note xxxix Proceedings 1 Indexes 273 PREFACE The Proceedings of the Manchester Special Board of Health are deposited in Manchester Local Studies and Archives, Manchester Central Library. They con­ sist of two volumes: the first volume (M9/36/1) covers the period 10 November 1831-15 August 1832, the second volume (M9/36/2) covers the period 16 August 1832-31 October 1833. The latter includes instructions and correspondence with the Central Board of Health, a correspondence that can also be followed in the letter books of the Central Board in the National Archives (PCI/93-97; PC1/99- 100; PC 1/102-103; H031/17). The local board of health was the principal agency by which the State looked to meet the threat of cholera in 1831. Local boards were ad hoc bodies with lim­ ited powers, operating for the duration of the crisis. Over 800 local boards were established in England and Wales in 1831-32. The administrative records of the majority of these have not survived. Where they have done so, they mainly cover smaller communities. In the Manchester region, for example, the minute books of the boards of Heaton Norris (Stockport Archives, B/CC/6/16) and Bacup (Manchester Local Studies and Archives LI02/7/1) are in the public archives. Fortunately, the Proceedings of the Manchester Special Board - so named to dis­ tinguish it from the existing Manchester Board of Health - are part of the city’s municipal archive. They are one of the few sets of minutes of a local board of health of a major town to have survived. Even though the minutes of the board’s various sub-committees are lost, the proceedings present a remarkable record of how one urban community prepared itself for the onset of Asiatic Cholera, and then responded to this frightening disease once it arrived in the town. In preparing the Proceedings for publication we have been helped by many peo­ ple. Even in the ‘publish or perish’ culture of the modern university most books take longer to complete than their authors estimate. This volume has had a long gestation period and we would like to thank the Council of the Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire for their patience in awaiting its arrival. We are espe­ cially grateful to Peter McNiven, the society’s general editor, who has provided encouragement and excellent advice in preparing the final text for publication. We are extremely grateful to Kevin Bolton, Principal Archivist in the Archives and Local Studies Department of Manchester Central Library, for permission to reproduce the volumes and for his assistance in accessing them for transcription and checking. We are also indebted to Richard Bond and his staff in the Local Studies Library for facilitating our research into the 1832 epidemic. We have also benefited from the assistance of Michael Powell and his staff in Chetham’s Library. We are most grateful to Nigel Rudyard who typed the original manuscript with an expertise that went far beyond that of a mere typist. More recently, Bob Mather transcribed the sextons’ registers of the Collegiate Church for the months cover­ ing the epidemic. Stephen Yates of the Visual Resources Centre, Manchester Metropolitan University, prepared the illustrations included in this volume. The map of the township of Manchester was drawn by Ian Reid of Information and Communication Technology Services, Manchester Metropolitan University. Anti-medical sentiment 1832: Henry Heath’s lithograph caricatures members of the Central Board o f Health as taunting prospective patients with a skeletal dummy representing cholera. (Courtesy of Wellcome Images). INTRODUCTION* Cholera remains a significant disease in third world countries today, where its association with poverty, impure water supplies and inadequate sanitation can sometimes be compounded by the failures of governments, as the epidemics in Zaire in 1994 and Zimbabwe in 2008-09 demonstrated.1 In spite of the availabil­ ity of cheap and easily administered oral re-hydration therapy since the 1970s,2 epidemics with high case fatality rates continue to challenge national and inter­ national medical authorities. Surveillance of high-risk areas and co-ordinating responses to outbreaks are priorities for the World Health Organization’s Global Task Force on Cholera Control, set up in the wake of the 1991 Peru epidemic.3 By contrast, for Western industrialised societies cholera has become one of the conquered diseases, testimony to the effective implementation of scientific public health policies since the nineteenth century. However, before these advances cholera epidemics repeatedly swept across the newly industrialising world. There were five cholera pandemics between 1817 and 1896.4 Britain’s first epidemic of what was known as ‘Asiatic Cholera’, to distinguish it from the endemic ‘English Cholera’ or ‘summer diarrhoea’,5 was in 1831-32, part of the second pandemic. Cholera returned in 1848^49, 1853-54 and 1866. Recorded deaths in all these epidemics totalled 140,000, although in an age with­ out reliable national mortality data this probably underestimated the real figure. The epidemic of 1831-33 alone left a trail of over 51,000 deaths across the British * Sections of this introduction draw on A. Kidd and T. Wyke, ‘The Cholera Epidemic in Manchester 1831-2’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 87 (2005), pp. 43-56 and A. Kidd, ‘Constructing a Moral Pathology of the Industrial Town: Manchester and the Cholera Epidemic of 1831-1832’ in A. Fahrmeir and E. Rembold, eds., Representation of British Cities: the Transformation of Urban Space 1700-2000 (Berlin, Philo, 2003), pp. 73-89. 1 ‘Public Health Impact of the Rwandan Refugee Crisis: What Happened in Goma, Zaire in July, 1994?’, The Lancet, vol. 345, issue 8946, 11 February 1995, pp. 339-44; ‘Zimbabwe’s Humanitarian Crisis Worsens’, The Lancet, vol. 373, issue 9662, 7 February 2009, p. 447. 2 J.N. Ruxin, ‘Magic Bullet: The History of Oral Rehydration Therapy’, Medical History, 38 (1994), pp. 363-97. 3 Marcos Cueto, ‘Stigma and Blame During an Epidemic. Cholera in Peru, 1991' in Diego Armus, ed., Disease in the History of Modem Latin America: From Malaria to AIDS (Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 2003). 4 Debate continues over the precise dating of the pandemics but the generally agreed dates are: 1817-23, 1829-51, 1852-59, 1863-79, 1881-96. R. Pollitzer, Cholera (Geneva, World Health Organization, 1959); D. Barua and W.B. Greenhough III, eds., Cholera (New York, Plenum, 1992), pp. 7-14. 5 The symptoms and treatment of English cholera were discussed before 1832 in popular med­ ical manuals such as William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine. On the local usage of cholera to describe bowel complaints see S. Chapman, ed., The Autobiography of David Whitehead of Rawtenstall (1790-1865) Cotton Spinner and Merchant (Helmshore Local History Society, 2001), pp. 151-2. ix x Introduction Isles.6 This was a significant death toll, but as an epidemic disease causing death and debility, cholera was surpassed by typhoid, scarlet fever, smallpox and measles. Neither did it rank in the serious mortality crises identified by Wrigley and Schofield in their classic reconstruction of population in England from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.7 Nonetheless it was the Asiatic Cholera that became embedded in the national consciousness. This was in no small part due to the fact that it can be one of the most rapidly fatal illnesses to affect humans, for which, in 1831, there was no effective remedy and for which public prayer and fasting were official policies.8 The incubation period during which the enterox- in producing strains of the bacterium vibrio cholerae infected the intestines could be anything between a few hours and five days. After this the predominant symp­ toms were dramatic: severe and watery diarrhoea (rice-water stools), vomiting, and massive loss of fluids and electrolytes (as much as 20 litres), resulting in dehy­ dration and damage to the internal organs.