Culture  /  Book Review

Charles Averill’s The Cholera-Fiend: Fiction for a Pandemic

The 1850 novel reveals disturbing continuities between the 19th century cholera pandemics and global health crises today.

Readers of The Cholera-Fiend will find that the experience of living in a pandemic differs less markedly between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries than one might expect. For example, as is the case in our current moment of global pandemic, there is confusion in the novel about what causes the disease in question. The three villains of the novel clearly believe cholera to be spread via miasma—through the air. So, using maps of New York City and an understanding of its weather, they break open tombs in strategically chosen cemeteries around the city, so that foul air will circulate most readily and infect the largest number of people. Nevertheless, the novel itself offers different advice for those hoping to remain healthy, advising readers that the best thing they can do is avoid agitation, excitement, and fruit (60). Additionally, the experiences and outcomes of past outbreaks—particularly the 1832 pandemic—haunt the narrative in 1849, as past pandemics do today. Most strikingly, readers will find echoes of the experience of COVID-19 in the novel’s overt racism and ableism. Racism and racist narratives, as well as ableism and ableist narratives, have long structured epidemics, determining, as Priscilla Wald has demonstrated so persuasively, paths of infection as well as who is treated and who is not, who lives and who dies.

This racist logic organizes The Cholera-Fiend: it bookends the story, it offers “comic relief” in an otherwise harrowing gothic tale, and it fleshes out what might otherwise be one-dimensional “heroes.” In the very first chapter, the villain doctor Quackenboss’s young apprentice Mark claims to treat the Black servant Gumbo with medicine that sickens him. We are asked to understand this as a “good-humored trick,” a phrase used later by Mark to describe Gumbo’s psychological torture by the novel’s other hero, Clinton (68). Gumbo’s concerns about his health (real conditions inflicted by Mark and Clinton notwithstanding) are cast as the products of a paranoid, dim-witted character’s imagination. The joke treatments perpetrated at Gumbo’s expense narratively work to make Mark and Clinton more likeable. And, as with some politicians and public figures today who treat Black lives as expendable during the COVID-19 pandemic, Averill’s characters never worry that Gumbo might really be sick.

Nevertheless, there’s something more than simple racism at play here. After all, Gumbo complains of gastrointestinal distress and anxiously eyes Clinton as he read the day’s paper, “a waitin to see ef dere am any furder ‘counts ob dat debblish tape-worm, dat ebery body is ‘peaking ob” (54). Here the tapeworm, which Gumbo claims to have contracted himself from “dat pump in de kitchen” seems very much like cholera, although the novel itself never says so (54). Although The Cholera-Fiendsubscribes to the popular theory that cholera was airborne—or, in the medical language of the day, miasmatic—the etiology Gumbo offers accords with the popular (and correct!) theory offered by British physician John Snow, who hypothesized in 1849 that cholera was waterborne and largely blamed communal water pumps. We cannot know if Averill knew about Snow’s popular hypothesis, although if he looked to slight Snow with this detail, the slight would have been short-lived, as Western medicine quickly came to realize Snow was right. Furthermore, since the African American community had been disproportionately affected by the cholera in 1832, contracting the disease at roughly twice the rate of white Americans in cities like Philadelphia, it makes particular sense that Gumbo would be both most afraid of the disease and most attentive to information about it. In short, Averill may adopt a racist attitude toward Gumbo, but by framing the novel with conversations about Gumbo’s body—and particularly Gumbo’s persistent presentation of and talk about his body as diseased—as well as the lengths to which the text goes to lampoon Gumbo’s knowledge and symptoms (not all of which are risible) suggests Averill knows, at some level, the African American experience of the pandemic was fundamental to understanding it.