This week I will not be talking about a specific person in history, I will be telling the narrative of the Blue Terror, otherwise known as cholera. We mainly see the discussion of diseases surrounding the Black Death, but I want to take a look at the British colonies in India.

    Imagine in India, 1857, you are watching your friend and family fall ill to the deadly cholera. A disease that was most feared by the English behind the walls of the settled British complex and those at home. This was due to its rapid effect and horrific onset of what it symbolized, death.

    During their bedside vigil, your friend would have experienced severe diarrhea, losing liters of fluid. Vomiting and writhing in pain, their thirst would have been unquenchable and their eyes and cheeks may have sunk into her face. Most startlingly, their  lips, fingernails and skin would probably have turned an eerie shade of blue.

    Within three hours the cold and clammy “dews of death” gathered on the patient’s brow and they lost consciousness. By 20:00, as your friend’s mother dies and leaves her, the now motherless child slept unawares, your friend was already in her coffin. Surprisingly for the wife of a medical officer, this swift demise was your first experience of “death in any shape”. Yet, just a month before, cholera had claimed the life of the Commander-in-Chief of British India. You were also destined to encounter the disease again in the coming weeks.

    Cholera had been known in India for hundreds, if not thousands of years, but for centuries it was limited to the Bengal region in the east. The “blue terror” travelled across India – and beyond – as the British expanded their grip on a country that had been under the control of the British East India Company for a century.

    As the leading cause of death among British troops in India, cholera earned itself a reputation as an insidious, violent enemy, always ready to attack. The British viewed Indians – and their “very loose habits” – as the natural cause of the disease, but the British themselves acted as carriers. Their large-scale troop movements aided cholera’s emergence from Bengal, British soldiers fighting on India’s northern borders introduced the disease to their Afghan and Nepalese opponents, and British troops carried it to the Persian Gulf, when they were deployed to Oman.

    Even civil interventions by the colonial power contributed to cholera’s spread. By the time Bartrum arrived in Lucknow, the country’s first railway and the world’s largest canal – a network of routes spanning over 1,000 km – had opened. Both aided cholera’s expansion across the country.

Many Indians blamed the British for cholera’s spread, albeit for different reasons. Some believed cholera was meted out as divine retribution when the British defiled holy places or slaughtered cows, which are considered sacred in the Hindu religion. Others felt the disease was caused by deities who resented British rule. Since Indians were just as likely to catch cholera as the colonists, this meant the wrath of these gods was also targeted at Indians, who had failed to stand up to the British.

Sanitation was very much lacking in old medical practices. Mortality resulted in infections that sometimes led to mortality. One person who made a very important milestone in the sanitation for medical treatment was Ignaz Semmelweis. Known as the “father of infection control”, Dr Ignaz, or Ignac, Semmelweis was a Hungarian born physician who received his MD degree in Vienna in 1844.

Ritual hand-washing has appeared to have come with public health implications. During the Black Death of the 14th century, for instance, the Jewish population of Europe had a distinctly lower rate of death than other demographics. Researchers believe that hand-washing prescribed by their religion probably served as protection during the epidemic.

Hand-washing as a health care prerogative did not really surface until the mid-1800s, when Ignaz Semmelweis, a physician, performed an important observational study at Vienna General Hospital.

After becoming disillusioned with the study of law, Semmelweis moved to the study of medicine, graduating with a medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1844. Having graduated from this prestigious institution, he believed he would be able to pursue a choice practice. He applied for positions in pathology and then medicine, but received rejections in both.

Semmelweis then turned to obstetrics, a relatively new area for physicians, previously dominated by midwifery, which was less prestigious and where it was easier to obtain a position. He began working in the obstetrics division of the Vienna Hospital on July 1, 1846.

The leading cause of maternal mortality in Europe at that time was puerperal fever, an infection, now known to be caused by the streptococcus bacterium, that killed postpartum women.

Prior to 1823, about 1 in 100 women died in childbirth at the Vienna Hospital. But after a policy change mandated that medical students and obstetricians perform autopsies in addition to their other duties, the mortality rate for new mothers suddenly jumped to 7.5%. The goal now was to figure out why.

Eventually, the Vienna Hospital opened a second obstetrics division, to be staffed entirely by midwives. The older, First Division, to which Semmelweis was assigned, was staffed only by physicians and medical students. Rather quickly it became apparent that the mortality rate in the first division was much higher than the second.

Semmelweis set out to investigate. He examined all the similarities and differences of the two divisions. The only significant difference was that male doctors and medical students delivered in the first division and female midwives in the second.

Semmelweis noticed that doctors and students rarely washed their hands and that gloves were not commonplace. Realizing that chloride solution rid objects of their odors, Semmelweis mandated hand-washing across his department. Starting in May 1847, anyone entering the First Division had to wash their hands in a bowl of chloride solution. The incidence of puerperal fever and death subsequently dropped precipitously by the end of the year.

Ignaz Semmelweis set a precedent in the medical world that saved people’s lives. Sometimes all we are taught about medical practices are the milestones in technology and cure. We are not taught about the milestones that are not as technologically advanced. However, the mandate that Semmelweis institutes is just as important, or even more. This is because without this practice, those procedures we learn about, would not be as successful.

What we are currently seeing in the United States right now has been equated to be a war on every female’s reproductive system. Bills are being passed to make an abortion illegal after six weeks, only halfway through the first trimester. Planned Parenthood laws in Texas state that after the appointment with Planned Parenthood you must wait three days before receiving your medication. This means that female students, workers and community members, along with a friend, must take at least four days out of their week to access this healthcare. The illegal sterilization of women of color, immigrants, those on welfare, and disabled females is occurring throughout the United States. All of these examples are taking place in our time, they are not past memories. These examples are aiming to prevent women in this country from accessing their right to have control over their own body.This topic is sensitive, but it is very important to talk about. So for this week I will be talking about “Jane”, sometimes referred to as the “Jane Collective”. 

In 1965 abortions were illegal. No female could receive an abortion legally up until Roe v. Wade in 1973. However, abortions were not just created in 1973, they were still occurring before then. Oftentimes, the procedure had no medical training, professionals who risked losing their licenses, or with unsanitary medical equipment. 

The Jane Collective began in 1965, when a student from the University of Chicago named Heather Booth was involved in Civil Rights. Booth had a friend who needed an abortion and found a doctor to perform the abortion. After her friend’s abortion, Booth continued to refer other students in need of abortions to the physician. Soon, Booth was overwhelmed with numerous requests.

Along with Booth, another anonymous founder of Jane, whom historian Laura Kaplan refers to as Jenny, played a role in the founding of the organization. Jenny had sought an abortion during the late 1960s. At the time, because abortion was illegal, the only way to have a legal abortion was to obtain doctor and hospital permission, granted through a hospital’s therapeutic abortion committee. If the abortion was deemed necessary for therapeutic reasons because the pregnancy endangered the woman’s life, then the woman could undergo the procedure. However, that was extremely rare. According to historian Kaplan, Jenny struggled to get permission for her abortion even though she had cancer and the pregnancy would endanger her health. Eventually, Jenny was granted permission for an abortion. However, in an interview Jenny stated that she was displeased with the lack of women involved in her abortion process and the fact that male physicians and hospital boards controlled her reproductive rights.

In 1967 several women, including Booth and Jenny, created a group called the Service, which provided abortions to women of all races, ages, and social classes without requiring them to provide an explanation for their requests. The group was composed of mostly homemakers living in the Hyde Park area of Chicago, as well as students at the University of Chicago. The Service evolved into the Jane Collective over the course of several months, becoming a formal referral service. Originally, the abortion providers working for the Jane Collective were all individuals who claimed to be physicians. While some had formal medical training, members discovered that many of them were not professionally trained in medicine and because of that, activist members of the Jane Collective began educating themselves on how to perform abortions. For a woman to receive this service, they just needed to call a local number and ask for Jane. This call would then be passed out. Representatives of the organization would then give the woman their service.

The Jane Collective grew to be a very successful organization that provided close twelve thousand abortions and created a charity fund. This is the material we need to be learning about in order to grow awareness. This collective should never had to occur because these services are basic rights of every female, American or not.

María de Zayas is one of the most popular women writers of seventeenth-Century Spain. In Zaya’s younger years she participated in literary academies, together with her male counterparts, at least in the academy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, led by Catalan writer Francesc de Fontanella in Barcelona, and the academy of Medrano (1617-1622) and later Mendoza (1623-1637) in Madrid. Further research into these literary meetings may provide more details about her public life. In any case, we must keep in mind that the handfuls of learned women we know as “letradas,” were not the norm. The public display of talent and speech of the learned women was not positively seen by society, as it amounted to being “public women.”

She wrote a play, La traición en la amistad (Friendship Betrayed), around 1632; she composed poetry, some of which she included in her novels; and she is best known for her two collections of short novels, each comprised of ten novels within a narrative frame, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares (Amorous and Exemplary Novels) in 1637, the first volume, and Desengaños amorosos (The Disenchantments of Love) in 1647. Details from her chosen genre, subject matter, as well as from her life reveal her as a proto-feminist, and a learned woman, an engaged intellectual of her day, who paved the road for women writers as well as for women in general. 

Zayas is often overlooked when scholars and students look into the Spanish Renaissance. People tend to focus on the Spanish Inquisition or Don Quixote. However, her works are very important when recognizing the trials of her time. The stories and plays often focus on violence against women and women telling their own tales of suffering to other women, a sign of modern phrase “consciousness-raising”. The stories are gruesome and described by some critics as ‘proto-gothic’, including scenes of torture, rape, beheading, poison, and confinement.

Throughout her two collections María de Zayas claims for the need for women’s education. Not only is she a woman who speaks publicly, uncommon in her days, in her “Prologue” she also requests that readers buy her novels, possibly an ironic statement since women commonly did not earn money outside marriage or the convent. This style of work makes her a Spanish early modern feminist because they connect to the work of the “querelle des femmes”. Other topics that appear in her novels, though not as blatantly as the “querelle,” include: the rise of violence; the conditions of the poor and the status of prostitution; the social and spatial divisions of her time; the creation of women’s jails; the effects of the colonies; normalization; the improper female body; and, above all, the dangers of idleness. All of these are issues that were of interest to the moralists of Zayas’s days, and since those topics were discussed in the literary gatherings or academies, Zayas’s constant discussions reveal an awareness of, if not direct participation in those circles.

María de Zayas was a beautiful writer who was a brave woman of her time. She represents an entire generation of feminist during a time many of us do not learn many details about.