Hamburgers, Toilets, and Past Global Pandemics

A Hamburg, Germany sanitation team (1892)

The West is soft.

We've lost connection with our history, become cavalier about our faith in God, and grown comfortable with our false belief that economical, medical, and social progress steadily moves - without interruption - toward utopian perfection.

A virus that kills between 1% to 2% of those infected has shocked our world.

But COVID-19 shouldn't shock us.

Not if we know our history.

Let me take you back just a little over one hundred years ago.

Hamburg, Germany, August 1892

Hamburg is the picturesque German city from whence we get our word "hamburger."

Hamburg (er)

Just like "wiener" comes from Vienna (the "w" is pronounced with a hard "v" in German) and frankfurter from Frankfurt, we get the name for cooked meat between two pieces of bread from Hamburg.

On  Tuesday, August 16, 1892, it was reported to city officials that two people - that's right, two people - had become critically ill with symptoms of cholera.

Cholera was the COVID-19 of the 1800s.

There were SIX global pandemics of cholera during the 1800s.

Hamburg became ground zero of the FIFTH global pandemic of cholera (1892-1897).

Nobody at the time knew how cholera spread among people. Most thought it was caused by "breathing air" or living in "filthy conditions." Thus, any neighborhood "infected" with cholera was banished by the healthy.

On August 23, 1892, one week after the first two cases of cholera were reported in Hamburg, officials declared a city-wide emergency. Cholera had spread to multiple neighborhoods.

But it was too late.

By August 27, 1892, cholera claimed the lives of 1,000 people per day in Hamburg, Germany.

The death rate was 57.5%. That means that more than half of the people who contracted cholera in Hamburg died.

For perspective,  it is roughly estimated that COVID-19 claims the lives of between 1% and 2% of those infected.

Imagine living during the 1800s when cholera swept the world. There was a 50/50 chance that if you contracted it, you would die.

Death by cholera was gruesome.

The victim had constant, watery diarrhea; nausea and vomiting; and unbearable cramps that led to human dehydration and physical shock, and then death.

The city of Hamburg had been attacked by an epidemic of cholera 14 times during the 19th century (prior to 1892). But this last time, the beginning of the 1892 global pandemic of cholera, was the worst.

From August 16 to November 14, 1892, 8,605 persons died in Hamburg of cholera.  Millions would die around the world before the 5th global pandemic of cholera came to an end.

People fled Hamburg. Business shut down. Churches closed. Streets were filled with the dead and dying.

Seven vessels loaded with residents of Hamburg made their way to the United States, bringing cholera with them.

A few of those Germans made the 1893 Land Run in Oklahoma.

Mark Twain

Mark Twain, the author of Tom Sawyer, visited Hamburg during the cholera epidemic and wrote a The Cholera Epidemic in Hamburg (1892).

Remember, an epidemic is local. A pandemic is global.

Twain's pamphlet about the epidemic in Hamburg is a scathing indictment on social inequality that he saw first-hand as he walked the barren streets. He wrote:

"A physician in Hamburg stated that everyday numbers of poor people are snatched from their homes to the pest houses, and that is the last that is heard of a good many of them."

The rich were treated well by physicians, but the poor were banished to "pest houses" to die.

Why the disparity?

Listen to Twain:

"We have heard rumors that the force of workers at Hamburg was too small to cope with the pestilence; that more help was impossible to get; and we have seen statements that confirm these sorrowful facts; statements which furnished the pitiful spectacle of brave workers dying at their posts from exhaustion; of corpses lying in the halls of the hospitals, waiting there because there was no worker idle; of a wagon going along the street with five sick people in it, and with them four corpses!" 

Sound familiar?

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

A by-product from the discovery of the cause of cholera

The germ theory of bacterial infection had not yet been formulated in Twain's day.

People in the 1800s didn't know that cholera was caught by drinking infected water. Human fecal matter was often deposited in the ground near streams or freshwater wells where people came to drink, and that is how cholera was spread.

Contaminated drinking water was the cause of cholera.

But that would not be discovered until the 1900s. After germ theory became accepted, cities began developments in wastewater treatment centers, especially throughout the United States, Great Britain, and Europe.

When you know your history, you know that humanity is not immune to trouble.

We live in a world often interrupted by social, medical, astral, and personal catastrophes.

"All people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment." (Hebrews 9:27)

Or, as I like to say it, "You're never ready to live until you're ready to die."

"But thank God! He gives us victory over sin and death through our Lord Jesus Christ." (I Corinthians 15:57).

So next time you eat a hamburger or use a toilet, remember that the panic associated with COVID-19 isn't something new to humanity.