ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Celebrated Anti-Cholera Belt: A Global Account of a Forgotten Piece of Prophylactic Clothing

• In Event: Health During and After the British Empire

English Abstract

This paper considers the history of the anti-cholera belt, a forgotten piece of prophylatic clothing made from wool fibers, through newspaper advertisements, medical reports, and how-to instructions. The anti-cholera belt was a common part of the wardrobe of European colonists in India, South Africa, Nigeria, and other places during British colonial expansion where there were successive cholera pandemics until the 1920s. An undergarment related to the history of the cummerbund, anti-cholera belts were an early type of medical and healthcare textile used to prevent disease. In the nineteenth century, people believed that the wool fibers and optional copper cover plate helped to filter the miasmas floating in the air that they understood to cause cholera. Even after germ theory recreated the definition of cholera to include contaminated water by the 1850s, and then specific bacillus by the 1880s, people continued to wear anti-cholera belts. In the absence of a clear cure for cholera, European colonists, in particular, trusted anti-cholera belts to keep them from getting night chills and diarrhea in the tropics. Soldiers wore anti-cholera belts during WWI before they fell out of favor by the 1930s. This historical investigation places anti-cholera belts within the revived field of the history of medical and healthcare textiles. It considers a vintage diagram to make a flannel cholera belt and instructions to make a knitted one alongside an analysis of related garments the author sewed as a way to document and reenact its fraught global history.

Author

• Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, University of Texas at Austin