During the cholera epidemic of 1831, opinions about the transmission of the disease were highly divided. Some physicians and public health authorities believed that the illness was communicated through direct contact with affected people and goods, whereas others considered that cholera was spread through a miasma or polluted air. The immediate official response was to follow the contagionist stance and attribute the main cause to the illegal influx of people from the Kingdom of Poland. Authorities also took into consideration local factors and individual predisposition to the disease. As Peter Baldwin states, “the official Prussian position affirmed cholera’s transmissibility while also insisting that individuals could lessen or increase their predisposition to it.” The predisposing factors included “individual dietary and hygienic habits, states of mind, insanitary and crowded living circumstances and atmospheric conditions.”77 This definition of disease causation gave the government and public health authorities major power over individuals, their cultural behaviors, and, in the context of the Polish uprising, their political associations.
In Posen, the first districts to succumb to cholera were the ones located along the Warthe River.78 Provincial president Flottwell responded to panic about the disease by mobilizing military troops to the border and quarantining the population. Authorities closed down schools, taverns, and theaters. They also tried to shut down some churches, but were unable to do this due to the personal intervention of the king.79 These severe measures caused popular unrest and riots against physicians and public health representatives in general. The attacks from the Catholic Church, especially over the handling of dead bodies, also contributed to the mistrust of government officials and the unity between the Polish lower classes and the clergy. Moreover, the presence of the military in the borderlands and the ineffective control of cholera cases, which kept spreading despite the cordon sanitaire, seemed to reinforce the idea held by supporters of the November Uprising that Prussia was actually containing the fever of the Polish revolution and not the disease.
Over the course of the epidemic, the Jewish community was the least affected by the disease. According to authorities, Jews adhered to hygienic ritual measures, followed the ordinances imposed by state authorities, and practiced a healthy diet.80 The low mortality rate from cholera among Poznanian Jews was mainly due to the successes of the Mosaic Cholera Commission and its leader, Rabbi Aki Eger. The commission taught Jewish families how to fight the disease and raised funds to treat Jewish patients with mild cases of cholera in the synagogue.81 This initiative was of great help to physicians because it allowed them to concentrate on the severe cases. Over the course of the epidemic, Polish Jews were also the ones who suffered most from the segregation policies officials implemented to control the disease, given that commercial relations, the source of income for many of them, were prohibited between Posen and other provinces. In some reports they were also blamed for importing the disease to Prussia, especially in Silesia, by smuggling contaminated goods from Poland.82
Cholera attacked Posen periodically from 1831 to 1873. In his description of the outbreaks, German-Jewish health counselor (Sanitätsrath) Joseph Samter attributed infection to environmental and cultural conditions. In 1886, he observed that “Posen’s soil formation; its fetid Warthe, ponds and ditches; the established need for water supply since the Middle Ages (although now being remedied); finally the three different races that the population originates from, [and] the historic, notorious alcoholism of the bottom classes give the epidemics of this city a special imprint, which, from the point of view of the latest researches about the causing agent of cholera, are suitable to take up interest even beyond the municipal area of Posen.”83 Thus, Posen was a special location to study and fight diseases. Disease control depended on the modernization and sanitation of the territories and on the transformation of unhealthy cultural behaviors of the inhabitants. For Samter, the health problems were a legacy of the underdevelopment the city had suffered since the Middle Ages. He considered ethnic diversity a problem for the overall health of the city. The fact that three “races”—by which he meant Germans, Poles, and Jews—coexisted in the same place seemed to contribute to disease communication, but he did not explain how or why.
The intensity of the cholera epidemics in the Grand Duchy of Posen continued to increase with the years, until a better system of water supply and a sanitary program were introduced in the province at the end of the 1860s and 1870s. A medical report from 1848 registered significantly higher cholera death rates for Poles than for Germans (392 Polish deaths vs. 250 German deaths) in the city of Posen with a population at the time of 42,000 inhabitants—described as 1/5 Jewish, 2/5 German, and 2/5 Polish.84 The report recorded 41 Jewish deaths. Many of the early quarantine measures the state took to control the disease during the first half of the nineteenth century actually tended to deteriorate the already precarious condition of the population. Authorities viewed the Prussian-Polish provinces as the natural passageway for the cholera epidemics and held Polish behavior and Catholic beliefs responsible for the spread of the disease. A significant number of medical reports underscored the poverty, underdevelopment, and the inhabitants’ low cultural standing, particularly in the countryside. Polish susceptibility to cholera was also echoed in the report that Hirsch wrote from the investigations he carried out as part of the 1873 Cholera Commission. He concluded that in the mixed districts of Posen and Prussia, when conditions were equal among Poles and Germans, the latter showed greater resistance against the disease due to their orderly living style and sobriety.85
The high toll the disease took in the region and the anti-Polish images spread in medical records were factors that helped mobilize both the Polish and the German medical profession throughout the German Empire. For the Office of Imperial Health as well as for other central authorities in Berlin, the close monitoring of the region became an important agenda for the survival of the imperial and national project. The German civilizing mission in Prussian Poland came to be defined in terms of the need for the modernization of the lands and the cultural conversion of others through science and hygienic teachings.
Polish Scientific Organizations
The recommendation that Jean-Jacques Rousseau made to members of the Confederation of Bar in his essay “Considerations on the Government of Poland and on Its Planned Reformation,” which he published just a few months before the First Partition of Poland (1772), was to cultivate the ideals of the nation in the heart of every Pole. He observed that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had neither the political strength nor the military discipline to counter the territorial expansion of neighboring countries, and it was thus doomed to lose its political independence. According to Rousseau, the single means to protect Polish culture and identity was “to infuse, so to speak, the soul of the confederates into the whole nation; that is to establish the Republic so much in the hearts of the Poles that it continues to exist there in spite of all its oppressors’ efforts.”86 Although he was extensively criticized for giving such a conservative response, Rousseau’s advice defined the political approach that many Poles used in the second half of the nineteenth century when the prospects for national independence seemed to be bleak.
The anti-Polish movement that characterized German official policy after the November Uprising in 1830 confronted Poles with the option of either joining the efforts of Polish revolutionaries abroad for national liberation or engaging in legal political opposition to the partitioning powers. The majority of Prussian Poles decided to follow the second path, which in the latter half of the nineteenth century came to be known as “organic work.”87 Polish positivist thinkers borrowed this concept from Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary theory to encourage Poles to take advantage of available civil liberties and economic opportunities to further Polish culture and educate the Polish masses. Throughout the nineteenth century, Polish intellectuals tried to overturn German colonizing agendas by teaching people Polish language and history and promoting Polish industry and trade. After the failure of the January 1863 uprising, many believed that the energy directed towards national armed revolutions should be guided instead towards national self-defense. This political stance actually helped consolidate the professional classes, particularly the medical profession.
One of the predecessors of Polish organic work in Prussian Poland was Karol Marcinkowski (1800–1846), a Poznanian physician with medical training in Berlin, Edinburgh,