Content area
Full Text
Throughout the spring and summer of 1831, government officials in the German city-state and North Sea port of Hamburg were closely monitoring the spread of cholera westwards across Europe. Between May and July, Hamburg authorities received news that cholera, the bacteriological disease endemic to the Bengal delta of the Indian subcontinent, had broken out in cities along the Baltic Sea, the Red Sea and the White Sea coasts. In response, they ordered into quarantine all arriving ships that had departed from those ports before they could unload their cargoes in Hamburg.1 Likewise, after cholera had reached the inland population centres of Warsaw, Berlin and Vienna between June and September, Hamburg placed restrictions on the entrance into the city of goods and people travelling from these cities. In June, Hamburg's medical doctors began to meet weekly to discuss cholera and its treatment. At the end of July, before any cases of cholera had been reported in Hamburg, the city council ordered the creation of two cholera hospitals. Each could accommodate two hundred patients and both were made ready within ten weeks.2
As Hamburg braced itself for the arrival of cholera, on 10 September 1831, Amalie Sieveking, a thirty-seven-year-old upper-class woman, whose late father had been a merchant and senator of Hamburg, issued an appeal in one of the city's newspapers.3 With the anticipated appearance of cholera in mind, Sieveking addressed her ‘beloved brothers and sisters in the Lord’ and invited them to join her in volunteering to nurse the ‘members of the poorer classes of our father city’. Sieveking continued:
We now live in a world that lies in a pitiful condition, a veritable showplace of sufferings and sorrows. We are living in so-called Christendom, but we are surrounded by those to whom ‘Christianity’ is just an empty word, those who have not experienced the sanctifying and quickening power of the gospel in their own hearts. Dare we boast that we have had such an experience of the gospel? If we have, regardless of whether we are men or women, must we then not all consider ourselves to be missionaries in a certain sense? Have we thus not become those who are commanded to proclaim the glorious goodness of Christ, who has called...