Pandemic Changes: Cholera in Nineteenth Century Japan

Guest speaker: Professor William Johnston, John E. Andrus Professor of History, Wesleyan University

Thursday, 28 April 2022 at 6:00 PM EST

The ongoing pandemic of Covid-19 has a case fatality rate in the United States of approximately 1.6 percent—which is to say that around 16 of every 1,000 persons with the disease have died. Imagine a pandemic with a case fatality rate of 70 percent for untreated cases. In other words, 700 of every 1,000 persons who get the disease die. That is the case fatality rate for untreated cholera, and in the nineteenth century there were no effective treatments for the disease, which swept around the globe on multiple occasions. This talk examines how cholera changed Japan and how the Japanese responded to the disease.

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