Deliver Us from Evil: Part 3 - Cholera, Paranoia and Violence
Something in the Water? Conspiratorial Thinking in times of Health Crisis
Welcome to Part 3 of Deliver Us from Evil. This series is now expanding beyond José Delgado’s story, as we dive into the history of conspiratorial thinking during times of health crisis. You don’t need to read the first two parts this time; although relevant, they are not prerequisites.
My goal in this series is not merely exploring the history for its own sake; I also hope to arm you with the cognitive tools that you can use to analyse extraordinary claims, no matter where they come from, so you can protect yourself from the increasingly sophisticated tactics of swindlers and grifters that seem to saturate areas of Health and Wellness.
Let’s get started.
Humans have an innate need to feel like they understand.
This feeling of understanding allows us to pick sides, to assign blame, to justify, to conceptualise, to abstract, explain, critique. Whether or not we really do understand makes no difference, it’s the feeling which unlocks this suite of abilities for us.
The feelings we feel, our sensory perceptions, are not perfect analogues for the world around us. Our experience of reality is a construction, a synthesis of various approximations.
/r/im14andthisisdeep
Ok, but seriously, conspiracy theories are rife, and you have almost certainly observed them, and known people who’ve tried to convince you of their veracity. Before we start feeling all smug and superior, here’s a small fact: every last one of us believes in at least one conspiracy theory.
Maybe you believe one or more of the following:
Corporations are trying to control everything we consume by tracking everything we do,
Big pharma is trying to make us accept injections we don’t need by convincing us of the existence of viruses,
Capitalists want to keep us all subservient by convincing the working class to fight amongst themselves rather than their oppressors,
Communists are trying to enslave you and take over the world by taking away your free speech,
5G transmissions are a plot by Satanists to kill off the human population,
Oil companies are trying to protect their profits by spreading lies about renewable energy,
Wind Farms are a plot to murder all the world’s Whales,
Or, even that…a globe earth is a lie by governments to hide the fact that it’s really all just flat. Cuz, like, if everyone knew it was all just flat, then…. well…. I dunno.
Hell, even I believe in a couple of those. Try to guess which ones ;)
People that believe in conspiracy theories are not stupid. If they were, then I would be stupid, and we can’t have that (I just won’t allow it!)
If you don’t believe in any conspiracy theory at all, that would likely mean you weren’t a believer in the ability for humans to conspire together, and that would be a whole other problem
The Nazis certainly conspired to commit Genocide and conquer Europe, for example. Sometimes people will conspire to murder others at smaller scales, too. Gangs sometimes conspire to rob, kill, and dominate. Corporate executives sometimes conspire to pull off some pretty spectacular long-running frauds, like Enron. Occasionally multiple companies will conspire together, in cases of price-fixing. Politicians conspire too, with Watergate being a most famous example.
So it can be quite a task to separate fact from fiction, plausible from implausible.
Over the next few weeks, my plan is to simply take a tour through the scientific literature and historical analysis of people’s propensity for believing in health-related conspiracy theories, along with their origins, without insulting or belittling those that might believe in them.
I will also try to provide you with the cognitive tools for analysing claims about health, so that you can keep an open mind, while maintaining a grounded perspective.
I will also try to show that it is OK to be wrong and change your mind accordingly. It is, in fact, a supremely courageous act, and goes against our instinct to simply double-down.
Deciding who and what to trust is a normal part of being human: we can’t all do our own independent scientific analysis on every aspect of life.
I choose to trust the overwhelming scientific consensus on vaccine safety, the dangers of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, and the benefits of masks, even if a tiny number of studies disagree on one or another aspect.
On occasion, a paper comes out like this from Nature that suggests Vaccination status may be correlated with an increase in the incidence of anxiety and depression diagnosis within 3 months post-vaccination, while also being correlated with a surprising reduction in schizophrenia and bipolar diagnosis after 3 months.
Does this make me gasp and think “Oh god, the vaccine causes mental disease”?
No, it doesn’t.
Does it make me jump up and shout “Oh my god, I’m vaccinated against Schizophrenia!”?
No, it doesn’t.
I mean, I kinda want to do that anyway because what an interesting finding, but no.
The cumulative incidence of depression, anxiety, dissociative, stress-related, and somatoform disorders, sleep disorders, and sexual disorders at three months following COVID-19 vaccination were higher in the vaccination group than no vaccination group. However, schizophrenia and bipolar disorders showed lower cumulative incidence in the vaccination group than in the non-vaccinated group.
(Kim et al., 2024, p. 7)
Seriously, this is a really cool finding, and I kinda want to keep going on that subject because there’s more in that article that makes it an example of really fascinating science, but we’ve got other matters to attend to.
Let us begin with Cholera.
The Devil’s Indigestion
September 14th, 1893.
It was early morning, the sun still low over the horizon in Ilkeston, Derbyshire. The Roosters were feeling satisfied by that day’s crowing; a job well done.
A Nightsoilman, finishing his rounds in the centre of town, was collecting his last few privy buckets and chamber pots and emptying their contents into his cart. In his mid-50s, it was likely one of the only jobs available for someone of his age and education: a job no one else wanted.
The smell was rank, and the stink saturated every fibre of his clothing and his skin, maybe even his very bones.
There were moments he wondered whether God would let him into the heavenly Kingdom if his soul carried the stench from this line of work.
Surely in Heaven, he thought, there’s no need for chamber pots and privies; such foul things belong solely to the dominion of Hell.
As he moved along the street with his cart full of excrement, his entire body was suddenly seized with a cold dread; his stomach felt very, very wrong. His whole abdomen began writhing. He ran to the nearest house, knocking furiously, apologising for the disturbance so early in the morning; it was an emergency.
He didn’t feel much relief after emptying his bowels of all its contents. Everything still felt awful. Pain was setting in. Awful pain. By 9am, he set out for home, but collapsed in the middle of the street. He was found and picked up by another man with a cart, and arrived home at 11am.
That's when the vomiting began: a pale white, translucent milky liquid came pouring out of his mouth.
The following day, his face and his hands had become blue and shrivelled. The diarrhoea and vomiting had been going on repeatedly. He appeared utterly emaciated, drained of life, shrivelled like a prune. Eyes sunken into his head.
By that afternoon, he was dead.
This is just one of many, many stories of the awful deaths people would experience when Cholera strikes.
The outbreak in the 1890s was the third major epidemic of Cholera in the British Isles during the 19th Century. It killed people by draining the very life force from their bodies: water. Death would come through sudden and acute dehydration.
Cholera's first strike of that century ran from late 1831 to early 1833, and spawned with it an epidemic of paranoia, violence and hate so intense that it has been the focus of enormous research.
It is a case study of mass paranoia in the face of a public health crisis, and has resonance for our own times.
Letting the bodies hit the floor
“Rumours and myths of elites and especially of physicians employing the disease or inventing it to murder the poor galvanized communities to assemble in crowds in the thousands to attack hospitals and ‘liberate’ neighbours and kin from what the rioters perceived as death chambers.”
Samuel Kline Cohn, Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS (First edition)
Oxford University Press (2018)
Surgery in England was a burgeoning profession, thanks largely to the efforts of surgeons like John Hunter who pushed for training to be done on real human cadavers. Across Britain, the 1820s saw the rise of new Anatomy Colleges, and demand for cadavers rose concomitantly.
These institutions were paying good money for supplies of cadavers, and this quickly led to some unintended consequences, as profit motives often do: two men, one William Burke and his partner William Hare, carried out a spate of murders over a period of 10 months in 1828. 16 people were killed for their bodies to be sold as cadavers to the Edinburgh-based Dr Robert Knox.
It was never established whether Dr Knox himself had put the men up to the task of murder. The scandal took over the headlines in newspapers across the commonwealth.
Then in 1831, mere months before the first Cholera epidemic of the century was to explode in full force upon the island, a similar scandal involving another two men murdering for cadavers broke in the newspapers.
"Burking", or "to Burke", was to enter the British Lexicon, as a term referring to murder for harvesting bodies.
Cholera was well and truly established by November of that year, and the deaths came quick and fast. The populace, having been primed to be on the lookout for cases of Burking, saw bodies falling everywhere. For them, this could only mean one thing: the Anatomists were now resorting to mass poisoning to feed their insatiable greed for dead flesh.
The Anatomists must be stopped.
The rioting by the people began that terrible November. By December, they were burning down Anatomy schools, and the government resorted to calling out the troops in order to prevent a spiralling of violence.
Less than a week later, a special Cholera hospital in London was attacked, its surgeons threatened with death by the mob. The crowd believed the Surgeons were "Burking the poor wretches who were admitted". Another riot in June also invoked the obsession with Burking, believing that "the doctors merely wanted to get the poor into their clutches to Burke them!"
More riots followed. In August of 1832, “yet a fourth cholera riot erupted with a ‘mob’ forming outside the gates of Bristol’s cholera hospital: ‘a sailor, in a straw hat and smock frock, intoxicated and flourishing a stick in the faces of the constables’, declared he had been inside the hospital and witnessed the doctors ‘burking the poor people’. He yelled for the hospital to be pulled down.” (Cohn, 2018, p. 171)
Burial services were stormed, with the crowd forcing gravediggers to open the coffins in order to prove the bodies inside were really dead. In Glasgow, March saw rioters attacking gravediggers and threatening surgeons. When word of coffins being exhumed and raided for corpses spread around - after some people discovered an empty coffin in a cemetery - a crowd gathered, collected makeshift weapons and projectiles, and marched through town, breaking the windows of all houses of known "medical gentlemen".
They destroyed "everything connected with the hospital so far as possible". A rock thrown by one of the crowd struck a hospital patient, who died. A battle ensued between the Police and the enraged mob, who believed the sick were to be dissected.
On and on it went like this. Merely trying to do the right thing by those suffering from a most awful and deadly disease made you a target for violence, even if you weren't a doctor. Sometimes, Cholera patients themselves were accused of being "Burkers" for some reason, and would have to make a terrifying escape.
“it seems that the horrific lethality of the disease, combined with the need to bury the dead rapidly and the insistence that cholera bodies be buried in separate cemeteries without relatives in attendance, persuaded the poor to believe elites were weeding out excess populations.”
Samuel Kline Cohn, Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS
It could be argued that newspapers - keen to sensationalise and scandalise, since it helped to sell more copies - were a driving force in amplifying the delusions of the crowd. It is indeed a plausible contributor. However, just as much of a force - if not more-so - was the community rumour mill, a system of information networks as old as human society itself.
The example of the "sailor in a straw hat", who was drunk, yelling to the crowd about having "been inside the hospital" and having witnessed the "burking [of] the poor people", called for the hospital to be "pulled down", is particularly poignant, but was by no means the only instance of unknown community members whipping up a crowd with unfounded and unbelievable claims.
There were the boys who found spades and a hook tool, which were shown to adults and were assumed to have been used for exhuming bodies from grave sites. A crowd formed, dug up an entire cemetery, inspecting coffins, and upon finding a single one empty, began a destructive riot, claiming that doctors were stealing the bodies for dissection purposes. Whether or not that empty coffin was in fact a case of grave robbers providing cadavers to surgeons and anatomists was never questioned: it was simply assumed to be.
Cholera was not unique to the British Isles, of course; many countries around the world battled with outbreaks. Places with unsanitary water sources have long been its preferred target, and some developing countries still experience outbreaks to this day. Many countries that encountered Cholera epidemics had their own share of incredible rumours, usually related to an elite/masses dynamic, as in the rumours of "Burking". It and other infectious diseases are still today being proclaimed as hoaxes, conspiracies and plots of all kinds, and not the result of pathogens.
The unfortunate fact: Cholera was, and is, very real, and very deadly.
Stopping the Spread
Sewerage systems and public sanitation were still pretty much unknown for most of the 1800s. The miasma theory of disease meant that people would carry "nosegays" (bundles of nice-smelling flowers in a pouch worn around the waist) around with them during times of pestilence, believing that having a source of pleasant aroma would limit the amount of "miasmatic" vapours being inhaled into the body. By logical extension, this would limit ones exposure to "diseased air".
It was a perfectly logical thing to believe in the circumstances, really. We all feel repelled by foul smells, and no doubt we fear the potential for an illness, even if subconsciously. It made logical sense for most, and although factually wrong, it wasn't completely off base: some germs, as we know, spread through the air. Regardless of these resonances, the flowers would have been no more effective than placebo.
For some people, perhaps that was enough.
There was one other small problem: Cholera wasn't airborne. It was waterborne.
In the London area, the Thames was a major source of drinking water for many people. It was also where the nightsoilmen dumped their loads of human excrement daily, in enormous quantities.
The Thames was full of raw, untreated sewage.
It was absolutely infested with Cholera.
Ultimately, it took another couple of outbreaks, and a physician with an empirical mindset by the name of John Snow, to make the connection between tainted water sources and infection.
Once this became widely known and improved sewerage systems - as well as drinking water treatment and filtration - were rolled out, Cholera outbreaks became a thing of the past. That simple fact was the final proof to the true origins of the disease.
Information networks are often vectors both for pathogens of the body and of the mind.
Like a mesh network with "primary nodes", certain popular figures in a community act as super-spreaders of misinformation, making a habit of jumping on the latest conspiracy theory bandwagon in their particular field of interest: UFOs, Mind Control, Health, and so on.
Such individuals in the present day and age frequently have websites and blogs set up, with newsletters and a social media presence; and they always - always - have something to sell you. Everything they write, post, and talk about will have a way to tie in with their products and wares. Books, "detox" products, supplements, vitamins (always vitamins), healing retreats, crystals, you name it.
This is a standard strategy for many businesses: producing free content that fits peoples interest, hook them with emotive language, then guide them towards your sales funnel.
Many of these individuals - especially those prevalent in the Health & Wellness space - make sure to promote their credentials everywhere, affixing PhD and MD wherever their name might be found, in order to establish a sense of authoritativeness in their words and bypass your critical thinking.
They actively target audiences who show a typically healthy predisposition to distrusting the government and educated "elites", or who are already interested in alternative medicines and other “healing” practices (often based in spirituality). They sell themselves as underdogs or mavericks in their field, discredited by their peers for sharing “secrets the industry doesn’t want you to know” (secrets which are contained in their helpful books, buy now!)
They interview fantasists - people like the drunken sailor - who come wriggling out of the woodwork, claiming to have been eyewitness to all manner of incredible things. The citations and references they use in their articles more often than not point back to their own previous writings. Whenever citing a news item, it’s rarely ever from a mainstream news source: if the same event is written about in The Guardian and in somewhere like InfoWars, they will almost always cite the InfoWars version, as it is more likely to re-enforce the world-view they’re trying to sell you on.
Then, there's the most insidious factor of them all: the human mind's propensity for confusing correlation with causation.
Like the spades and hook tool found by those boys, the assumption was made that they had been used for stealing bodies from cemeteries for the purpose of dissection. It could very well have been true, but the trouble is that there are a million other possible uses for a spade and hook tool which have nothing to do with human cadavers.
Forrest for the Trees
"You have blokes like Burke going around murdering people to provide cadavers for the evil anatomists, and then when they're caught, suddenly everyone starts dying horrible deaths which can't be explained? That can’t be a coincidence."
If you zoom in close enough to anything, you lose sight of the larger details which make up the actual picture. Let’s take the example of a famous prank from 1997 when a high-school student made a petition to ban what he claimed was a most deadly chemical: Dihydrogen Monoxide:
Dihydrogen monoxide is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide do not end there. Prolonged exposure to its solid form causes severe tissue damage. Symptoms of DHMO ingestion can include excessive sweating and urination, and possibly a bloated feeling, nausea, vomiting and body electrolyte imbalance.
For those who have become dependent, DHMO withdrawal means certain death.
Nathan Zohner: Coalition to Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide Webpage (1997)
For those unfamiliar with this classic prank: Dihydrogen Monoxide is the Chemical Systematic Name for plain-old regular water. It’s also known as H2O.
Everything he wrote was true in a technical sense: accidental inhalation of water can lead to drowning, the solid form of water is ice and can cause hypothermia, drinking too much water can cause you to urinate and sweat more frequently (and in extreme cases, can even kill you), and total withdrawal from water consumption will lead to certain death in a matter of a couple days.
So, although water can be dangerous, context is everything. Here, we zoomed in closely to just these potential negatives, which is like focussing entirely on a single leaf while ignoring the whole rest of the forest.
If we based all of our decisions and beliefs in this manner, humans might never have discovered the usefulness of fire: we would have been too consumed by its potential danger to even imagine it in any other context.
However, any of us can fall for this way of thinking, including highly educated and scientifically accomplished researchers. Sometimes, a Nobel Prize winner in Science gets lost in the thickets of really strange ideas and beliefs. It happens often enough in fact that it has a name:
No one is safe!
This has been Part 3 of Deliver Us from Evil. Thank you so much for listening and reading, I really hope you enjoyed it. Next week, we’re going to explore one of the more recent and infamous extraordinary claims made by a real scientist, how people were made to believe in it, and its enduring consequences to this day: the Vaccines and Autism theory.
See you then!
Great read also I just joined im14andthisisdeep
Man I love that image. Ok now i’m off to actually read