Cholera to COVID — Like the past, this too shall pass

Abstract

“There was hawa-i-radhi (foul air) in the city, he was vomiting and had fever and a few loose motions. The hakim gave up and slowly he became lifeless.” ⁽¹⁾   These were the melancholic words of my beloved grandmother when she narrated to me the story of how she became a widow, when she was still in her early twenties. The sad event which happened about one hundred years ago may have been due to cholera or it could be the Spanish Flue — the Pandemic known as the Bombay Fever or War Fever in British India, which hit Maharaja Pratap Singh’s dominion of Jammu and Kashmir in 1918.  

 If it was the respiratory illness of Spanish Flue, the phrase hawa-i-radhi was very appropriate because it illustrates that at that time Kashmiris were aware that influenza is an air-borne disease. Having said that even cholera was thought to be caused by miasma (bad air) until 1854 when John Snow — a London General Practitioner and anesthetist removed the handle of a drinking pump infected by leakage from a sewer in Soho, London, and stopped the outbreak of the disease that had killed hundreds of Londoners in a couple of weeks. ⁽³⁾  

Cholera was indeed a major killer world-wide and it swept away herds of people all over the world. Five of the seven cholera pandemics in last 200 years originated from India and killed hundreds of thousands in the subcontinent alone. ⁽²⁾ Known by the name of Wobah, cholera brought cycles of devastation to Kashmir.  Beginning with 1824 it tormented the valley ten times during the nineteenth century. ⁽⁴⁾ The Gazetteer of Kashmir and Ladak recorded ‘no less than 23000 deaths . . . in the city of Srinagar alone’ during the governorship of Ghulam Mohy-ud-din in 1842. ⁽⁵⁾