“Cholera in New York” may not sound like your idea of an appealing topic for a Sunday afternoon, but it sure was mine on Sunday, February 21, 2010. George Munkenbeck, a gent of humor and intelligence, with a thorough, remarkable, and diverse acquaintance with numerous historical periods, was the speaker that afternoon.

George and his family have lived in Sayville since 1972. He is Chaplain of the West Sayville Fire Department. Mr. Munkenbeck is also the head of the New York State 14th Brooklyn Regiment, a Civil War re-enactment specialist, these are among but a few of his professional and personal favorite pursuits.

That Sunday afternoon, Mr. Munkenbeck spoke about Cholera; the disease, the first recorded outbreak, its cause, the social and economic ramifications of the 1832 outbreak in New York City and the Cholera-related medical breakthroughs that changed the medical profession forever.

As I sat in rapt attention, it occurred to me that Cholera in the nineteenth century could easily be compared to AIDS in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In the 1800’s, most commentators on the outbreak viewed Cholera in moralistic terms rather than as a real and significant general health problem. Of course, the outbreak did generate debate over public sanitation but often the discussions implied Cholera should be blamed on its victims and their lifestyles rather than on their environment.

Back then, doctors generally believed that miasmas, the noxious vapors from rotting organic matter, caused the gastrointestinal disease. Five Points, a lower East Side slum inhabited with African-Americans and immigrant Irish Catholics was particularly devastated by this disease. People lived in squalor and stench, and upper class New Yorkers looked down on the victims. It was a thought that if you got the disease (Cholera), it was your own doing.

In 1883, the bacterium Vibrio cholera was discovered to be the agent, but the real turning point in diagnosis and prevention came in 1854, when Dr. John Snow, a London physician firmly established the connection between contaminated water and cholera.

In The New York Times article, “How Epidemics Helped Shape the Modern Metropolis”, published April 15, 2008, John Noble Wilford wrote: “Dr. David D. Ho, a biomedical scientist at Rockefeller University, noted the similarities between the views on cholera and the initial reaction to a more recent epidemic that took science by surprise: AIDS. When the first AIDS cases were reported in 1981, the victims were almost all white gay men. They were treated as outcasts.”

“It was a repeat of the cholera experience,” said Dr. Ho, the founding chief executive of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center. “The cause of the disease was unknown, and it affected a subset of the population. It was easy to brand the victims and blame the disease on their lifestyle.”

I would like to thank Mr. George Munkenbeck for an outstanding presentation that afternoon and I sincerely look forward to the next program of The Sayville Historical Society (www.sayville.com/historicalsociety)

The author, Ginnie Moore, lives in Sayville and loves it almost as much as she loves her luggage. Ginnie can be contacted at: ginniemoore@verizon.net, and she would love to hear from you, really.