PROVVEDIMENTI PUBBLICI, COLERA E SOLIDARIETÀ NEL XIX SECOLO. L’EPIDEMIA DEL 1855 NELLA CITTÀ REGIA DI ALGHERO (SARDEGNA)

Cholera may be defined as a typical XIX-century disease. From 1835 and for about eight decades, cholera stuck Italy a number of times, causing several deaths among its population. This brought back memories of past epidemics resulting in a collective fear that the black death would soon spread again. In preunitarian years, the dreaded ‘return of the disease of the commercial revolution’ led the Sardinian municipalities, among others, to the adoption of a health policy that would ‘tame the potentially devastating consequences of an Asian cholera epidemics’ as well as ‘preventing the deadly disease from reaching the Island’. Such measures, however, met with an evident lack of medical competence and of skilled medical staff, usually replaced with non-trained personnel such as barbers and phlebotomists, but also with poor sanitation – people living with their livestock, malnutrition, insufficient infrastructures for the community, roads piled ‘with garbage, dung and foul waters’ – and the strong belief among the local communities that a mysterious combination of divine and meteorological agents would bring cholera back and punish them. This all suggests that a number of environmental and sanitary issues had long been neglected within the walls of many Sardinian towns, and in the town of Alghero especially.