A Sinful and Suffering Nation: Cholera and the Evolution of Medical and Religious Authority in Britain, 1832-1866‪.‬

In a time of challenges to existing religious beliefs and renegotiation of political and class oppositions, the four cholera epidemics between 1832 and 1866 became part of a debate on social authority and nationhood. In pamphlets, reports, sermons, and articles, conservative Anglican clergy and the emerging medical profession struggle over the right to publicly interpret the social meanings of cholera. The classes that the doctors and clergy intended to represent and control also had their own interpretations of the cholera epidemics, largely set in terms of negative social control. Careful examination of these materials shows how cholera became a foundational issue, in part because the confluence of discourses emerging from the Church crisis and reform, along with the chronological accident of the cholera epidemic of 1832, led to specific discursive moves on the part of Church, state, medical authorities, and labor organizations. In turn, these moves caused images and metaphors specific to the circumstances of the first cholera epidemic to gain an important, and perhaps even constitutive force, in the discourse of the national body as it emerged over the next four decades. **********