DGHI affiliate Deborah Jenson, professor of romance studies who co-directs the Duke Haiti Humanities Lab, published a new article with student researchers in the November issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases which explores the presence and spread of Cholera in the Caribbean Islands throughout history.
Medical journals and other sources do not show evidence that cholera occurred in Haiti before 2010, despite the devastating effect of this disease in the Caribbean region in the 19th century.
The Caribbean region experienced cholera in 3 major waves: 1833–1834, 1850–1856 and 1865–1872. In the 3 pandemics that involved the Caribbean in the 19th century, Jenson and the Haiti Lab team found no medical or lay reports of cholera in Haiti, the Netherlands Antilles of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao; the Cayman Islands; and St. Martin, St. Barthélemy, or Montserrat. Of these sites, Haiti is the largest and most densely populated and was a close neighbor of hard-hit Cuba and Jamaica.
Conditions associated with slavery and colonial military control were absent in independent Haiti. In other locations of the Caribbean, clustered populations, regular influx of new persons, and close quarters of barracks living contributed to spread of cholera. In the article, Jenson and Haiti Lab student researchers provide historical accounts of the presence and spread of cholera epidemics in Caribbean islands.
Historical Context for Cholera in Haiti
Although it is difficult to confirm the absence of a disease in an earlier era, this report explores textual evidence for the immunologic status of persons to cholera in Haiti reported in scientific journals and lay journalism sources from the 19th century. It also considers the reasons that epidemic cholera failed to occur in Haiti in the 19th century even though it did affect many neighboring environments, including the Dominican Republic.
There is no published source that identifies all Caribbean islands affected by cholera epidemics in the 19th century. In the field of 20th-century and 21st-century research, an article in 1985 by Kiple comes the closest to describing the effect of cholera across the 19th-century Caribbean. In assessing Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and St. Thomas, Kiple proposed that 200,000 deaths from cholera in the Caribbean would not be unrealistic, although a total figure would have to be “considerably higher as a number of islands have not been included in this survey.” Higman notes that basic public health measures were prompted by cholera epidemics in the British Caribbean in the 19th century but that they emerged from “a maze of environmental mystery.” Vega Lugo provides a recent study of cholera in 19th-century Puerto Rico.
