Little known before the nineteenth century, cholera encircled the globe in a series of pandemics that spanned the nineteenth century. In response, communities, municipalities, and nations drew on new medical ideas — not least of all germ theory and sanitation — to defend themselves. This was one of the first times that scientific medicine and political administration had combined to fight epidemic disease, and its practice changed ideas both of “the public” and of “health.”

Michael Rossi is a historian of science and medicine at the University of Chicago. He teaches about medicine, disease, and society from the 1500s to the present. His research focuses on the historical metaphysics of the body: how different people at different times understood questions of beauty, truth, falsehood, pain, pleasure, goodness, and reality vis-à-vis their bodily selves and those of others. He is the author of The Republic of Colour: Science, Perception and the Making of Modern America, which deals with; color theory, politics, and aesthetics at the turn of the century. His newest project examines ways in which linguistics, physiology, and philosophy came together to make new forms of medicine in the twentieth century. He has written for the London Review of Books, Isis, and Cabinet, among other publications.