A few months ago I attended a talk on Kipling and Cholera by the
Warwick academic Pablo Mukherjee. My curiosity in medical
history (never, admittedly, miles from the surface) being
piqued, I typed ‘cholera’ into our catalogue search. Among other
sources I was greeted by eight Fellows – all elected in the 19th
Century. Sir David Barry (1780-1836) and Sir William Russell
(1773-1839) were both given titles as a result of their work
during the cholera epidemic of 1832; and indicative of their
work and that of their contemporaries on the disease, David
Douglas Cunningham (1843-1914) and Edward Emmanuel Klein
(1844-1925) were studying cholera in India in the second half of
the century. What of the other four then? Unfortunately, they
had been dispatched by cholera in the same period – a time when
cholera was rife and epidemics across the world were rampant,
the death toll somewhere in the millions. Cholera was, and still
is, by all accounts, a thoroughly unpleasant way to expire, as
Irwin W. Sherman recounts in Twe