Viral Culture and the Fear of Cholera in Finland, 1831–1854

In her book Cholera in Post-Revolutionary Paris: A Cultural History, Catherine J. Kudlick has analyzed the role of cholera in shaping political life and class identity in nineteenth-century France and pointed out the cultural ramifications of a disease. In early nineteenth century, cholera terrified Europeans and seemed to have no boundaries. The disease came also to Finland during the second global pandemic (1827–1835), which affected both Europe and North America. Its rapid spread has often been interpreted as a result of recent changes in transportation, global trade and migration. The newspapers, too, experienced a sudden growth in the 1820s and 1830s, which resulted in an ever-expanding media publicity. The readers of the press could follow the routes of the infectious disease almost day by day. My presentation is based on a research project where we have explored text reuse in the Finnish press of the nineteenth century by drawing on digital methodology. By identifying passages of similar texts in a corpus of five million pages, it has been possible to track down clusters of viral news chains. My argument is that cholera was not only an infectious disease, it also became a cultural meme that spread rapidly during the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s. The paper explores the emotional responses of this process, or merely – those emotions it finally produced