Trump's racism in "Chinese Virus" grew out of C19th cholera pandemic racism.

An offensive part of President Donald Trump’s reaction to coronavirus was when he called the novel coronavirus the China Virus.  Despite WHO specifically not naming the disease after any place where the outbreak might have begun, and despite know­ing that racist terminology fueled hate crimes against people of Asian descent, Trump’s anti-Asian discrimination continued.

Because Time’s photo showed the speech-change from “coronavirus” to “Chinese Virus” was in Trump’s own handwriting, I assumed the new label came from Trump’s racist thinking. A number of articles appeared, in sources of varying credibil­ity, criticising Chinese wet markets and tradit­ional medical pract­ic­es, again assigning a deeply cultural culpa­bility for coronavirus. Asian Americans were being harassed across the US, in the language of ill hygiene that many of these incidents occurred.

Time (top image)

Now Sagaree Jain has written a historic view of racism in chol­era pandemics. Historians marked the first cholera pandemic as 1817, spreading along trade routes from India to Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand, In­donesia, China and Japan by 1822. The second pandemic began in 1829-32, when the disease circulated from Britain to Canada and the USA, and from Mexico to Cuba. Eng­lish-speaking doctors on both sides of the Atl­an­tic referred to this new cholera by its place of origin. In 1831, the New York City Board of Health requ­ested that 3 of the city’s most prominent doctors quickly collect all information pub­lished in Europe or Asia on the subject of The Oriental Cholera.

The cholera epidemic was often blamed on foreigners; nativist groups re­vived fear of the spreading disease as a reason to restrict imm­ig­ration. NY mayor Philip Hone wrote about Europeans, not Asians, in 1832: “Irish and Germ­ans coming by Can­ada, New York and New Orleans, filthy, intemper­ate, unused to the comforts of life and regardless of its prop­riet­ies. They flock to the populous towns of the great West, with dis­ease contracted on shipboard, and increased by bad habits on shore. They inoculate the inhabitants of those beautiful cities, and every paper is only a record of premature mor­tality. The air seems to be corrupted and indulgence in things here­tofore innocent is frequently fatal now in these cholera times.” 

In the first waves of Asiatic Cholera, the British medical estab­l­ish­ment was still deeply influenced by the humoral-body fluids trad­ition found in Galen’s writing. It was believed that dis­ease stemmed from miasmas of bad air, especially in unsanitary con­d­it­ions. In the early C19th, British doctors accepted Indian pract­itioners where the common belief was that it was India’s hot climate that exposed British soldiers to disease. Wealth­ier Brit­ish colonisers moved to cooler hill-stations.

Only in 1854 did the British physician Dr John Snow locate a large outbreak of cholera via a single neighbourhood pump. He thus proved that cholera was transmitted in water.

Existing fears about Indian society increased the anxiety sur­rounding cholera's advance. The sanitary commissioner of Bengal Dr David Smith wrote scath­ingly on disease and unsanitary cond­it­ions in the Hindu pilgrimage to the god Jag­an­nath: “The human mind can’t sink lower than it has done in connec­t­ion with the appalling degeneration of idol-worship at Pooree.” 

In 1884, Dr Charles Macnamara lectured on Asiatic Chol­era at the Westminster Hospital, citing a 1871 government order: Asiatic cholera has a peculiar infectiousness which, when local conditions assist, can operate with terrible for­ce. In the C19th, Asiatic Cholera was used by Western­ers to de­scr­ibe a new disease that originated in Bengal and that was part­ic­ul­arly virul­ent and deadly. The term was also used to define a whole subcont­inent as diseased and unhygienic. South Asia was cast as being in some way to blame for a cholera that rav­aged the world.

British knowledge of sanitation and disease trans­mission advanced rapidly. But rather than leading to a common und­erstanding about the disease, Brit­ish doctors derided Indian hygiene. Hist­orian David Arn­old wrote in Cholera and Colonial­ism in British In­dia (1986): the Indian origins of ch­ol­­era and its global spread from Bengal made the disease a con­ven­ient sym­bol for what­ever the West feared about very diff­erent societies. One of the clearest expressions of this fear arose from the epid­emiol­ogical link between cholera and Hindu pilgrimage. Arnold knew that cholera was only a micro-organism; it acquired meaning and signif­icance from its human context. His research clarified that medical profession­als relied on moral judgments in character­ising Indians pilgrims.

Dr William Eggleston wrote Oriental Pil­grimages & Chol­era (1892): The most riotous imagination could scarcely exaggerate the filth of India & Egypt and of the Hindoo and Moh­ammedan pilgrims, for when peop­le use the same water for bathing, washing soiled clothes and drink­ing, they are scarcely ripe for moral suasion. So long as the pil­grimages continue, Europe and this country will be endangered and will be visited by cholera. 

The British inquired into the conditions of South Asian people on pilgrimages, then classified pilgrims as a dan­gerous class who needed specific surveillance systems. This revealed the power of the Colonial Gaze, the ability to categ­orise whole practices as senseless and backwards eg Hindu or Muslim pilgrimage.

It would not be until 1883 that scientists discovered that cholera was caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae carried in water.

Sagaree Jain concluded that cholera was used to drive a wedge bet­ween C19th British Empire cultures, intentionally or otherwise. Even as British doct­ors improved their understanding of disease transmission, racism continued. Between fear of cholera and ignorance of pil­grimages, the British medical establish­ment had characterised a whole culture as fil­thy. In 2020, we should not be repeating C19th racist assignations.