By Phil Egan for the Sarnia Journal
A dreadful image hangs today in the National Gallery of Canada.
The painting, by Joseph Lagare, depicts the terrified citizens of Quebec City scurrying about the
town’s market square in 1832.
Thick, black smoke from burning smudge pots fills an apocalyptic sky. In the painting’s left
foreground, a man can be seen falling to the ground. Near the centre of the painting, a horse-
drawn wagon is picking up the dead and dying. To the right, a group of Irish immigrants is
shown following a hearse.
Titled, The Cholera Plague, the painting evokes the horror that struck Canada when the disease
arrived in Canada in 1832. Over the following two years, as ships continued to arrive carrying
infected passengers, over 400 people would die in Halifax.
Cholera is a disease of the intestines, contracted by ingesting contaminated food or water.
In Sarnia in 1866, a panicked citizenry was afraid that it was coming back – and the Canadian
Observer was blaming immigrants.
“This class,” the newspaper told readers in Sarnia, “as is well-known, always suffers from
cholera, or any other form of epidemic disease that may prevail, to a greater extent than the
settled inhabitants of a country.”
Immigrants travelling from point to point suffered uncleanliness and a lack of nourishing food.
The previous summer, the disease had appeared in Europe. It was believed to be water-borne
and thought to travel from east to west. It was, the Observer said, a “foregone conclusion that
the dreaded disease would appear in the Province during the coming summer.”
In Sarnia in the spring of 1866, the fear was very real. Six times since 1832, the disease had
reached epidemic proportions in Canada, killing nearly 20,000 people.
In keeping with the mood of the times and together with blaming immigration, the newspaper
pointed its finger at another perennial target – booze.
The Observer expressed its concern about “the inhabitants of all the crowded lanes and filthy
alleys of all large cities and, in fact, everywhere squalor, poverty, and vice prevail, and
especially among the haunts of intemperance.”
Thirty-four years of experience in Canada with the disease had brought no significant
improvement in the ability of doctors to cure it. However, some lessons had been learned in
understanding how to reduce its deadly impact.
Fortunately, and despite the Observer’s fears, the Fourth Cholera Pandemic, which lasted from
1863 to 1875, resulted in only brief outbursts in Ontario cities. However, two months after the
Observer story alarmed Sarnians, 5,596 East End Londoners died from an outbreak of cholera.
In a days before the medical advances we take for granted today, it was a frightening time.