The AIDS Epidemic by William A Rushing

Author:William A Rushing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

Reactions to Fear

Fear of contagion led many people to leave cities and towns for the countryside (Rosenberg, 1962:26-28, 37; McGrew, 1965:12, 72-73; Langer, 1973: 107-108; Durey, 1979:139-141; Delaporte, 1986:58). For example, seventy thousand of the two hundred thousand inhabitants of New York City are said to have fled the city during the epidemic of 1832. On July 3 the New York Evening Post reported that roads “were lined with well-filled stage coaches, livery coaches, private vehicles and equestrians, all panic struck, fleeing from the city” (Marks and Beatty, 1976:202). People deserted the sick, including relatives and family members (Durey, 1979:161, 183).

Fear of contagion sometimes turned into violence. For example, in 1832 in Chester, Pennsylvania, “several persons suspected of carrying the pestilence” were killed, as was “the man who had sheltered them,” and militia fired on people traveling from cholera-infested areas (Rosenberg, 1962:37). In all countries brutal actions by authorities were recorded. In some places in tsarist Russia “police officials who enforced the sanitary [e.g., quarantine] regulations were notorious for their brutal methods,” with quarantines amounting to “virtual house arrest” so that “even food and water were difficult to get” (McGrew, 1965:50). In St. Petersburg “no person was safe on the streets. The sick and the well, the inebriates and the infirm, were collared, dumped unceremoniously into the dreaded cholera carts, and hauled off willy-nilly to lazarettes, often with whole families trailing the wagons wailing and weeping” (McGrew, 1965:109-110). Elsewhere “the police, who were charged with bringing suspected cholera patients to the hospital, ... [seized] anyone who looked suspicious. Those who were taken, cholera and non-cholera cases alike, were hustled into the hospitals, stripped of their clothes, dosed with calomel and opium, thrust into hot baths, and, when they resisted, were beaten into submission” (McGrew, 1965:69).

Scapegoats were found. Foreigners were blamed. The Russians accused the Poles of spreading the disease, the Poles accused the Russians, Europeans further west accused both the Poles and Russians (McGrew, 1965:101-102), and Americans accused immigrants, especially the Irish (Rosenberg, 1962:62). But the major scapegoats were the poor. The nature of the disease caused it to be concentrated among those who lived in dirty hovels and slums, where drinking water was most apt to be contaminated. Consequently, the wealthy and well-to-do accused the poor or masses of causing the disease and spreading it to the rest of the population. Beggars, vagrants, and itinerant workers were chased from the streets and even expelled from communities in England (Morris, 1976:117-125). The stricken poor were quickly quarantined in hospitals, and after death their bodies were commonly disposed of in mass secular burials, which denied the relatives the traditional religious wake (Delaporte, 1986:49; Evans, 1987:367).6 Although many of the well-to-do fled their communities, many others were indifferent and felt protected because the poor were kept segregated from the rest of the community.

The poor, in turn, had their scapegoats. Sometimes they initially denied that cholera was widespread (McGrew, 1965:110; Morris, 1976:94-101; Delaporte, 1986:47), but as the epidemics spread and deaths mounted, they were also gripped by fear of contagion.

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