THE STAFF OF DEATH - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 39

out from the East Coast's crowded cities and claimed lives with awe-inspiring speed, the nation pan-
icked. Roads out of affected areas were choked with refugees fleeing quarantine. Business in New York
City came to a standstill that summer, and public health officials around the country flailed to find ways
to slow the disease's spread. Health officials shoveled chloride of lime on every surface they could and
in some towns burned tar pitch to “purify the air”—efforts that may have reassured the public, but did
little against cholera. In New York, city officials banned the sale of nearly all fresh fruits and vegetables.
This draconian measure may, in fact, have helped slow food-borne cholera, but it also took a terrible toll
on the poor's already meager diet and livelihoods.
Medical authorities, for their part, offered even less help. Some of their prophylactic recommenda-
tions—heavy doses of port wine and the opiate laudanum, for example—may have dulled the senses,
but probably helped cholera kill. Others, like calomel, a toxic mercury compound prescribed to children
in doses “fit for a horse,” needed no help from King Cholera.
The impotency of medical treatment only confirmed the widespread popular sense that cholera had
been sent by God to strike down the wicked and test the virtuous. In this desperate context, Graham,
speaking to breathless audiences up and down the East Coast, offered a hopeful message of personal
empowerment. For Graham, cholera was not a punishment sent from on high. Nor did he give much
credence to the nascent ideas of sanitation science, which blamed the epidemic's spread on miserable
tenement conditions, the poverty of the country's new industrial working class, and corrupt city political
machines' inability to remove urban waste or protect the food supply. Further still from his mind was the
minority view that economic inequalities might play a role in the spread of disease. Despite the fact that
poor New Yorkers drank dangerous city water while wealthy residents, who could have pressured for
better infrastructure, simply bought expensive clean water from private contractors, Graham proclaimed
that cholera—and all other diseases, for that matter—stemmed from a lack of what we today might call
“personal responsibility.”
As historian of religion Catherine Albanese writes, “No longer was disease the result of God's pun-
ishment. … Rather, it was one's own decision.” 20 People brought disease upon themselves by yielding
to the temptation of physiological stimulation and they could banish it just as easily. Instead of framing
cholera as a righteous force inevitably clearing out “the scum of the city,” Graham offered a relatively
simple and practical defense against the disease. In theory anyone could follow Graham's prescription
and, he argued, it worked not just for cholera, but for all ailments, from headaches and cancer to ennui
and anxiety. In an era when mainstream medicine harmed more than it helped, his prescription may have
seemed prudish, but at least it didn't kill: no meat or white bread, less worry about what doctors say,
sexual abstinence, more exercise, temperance, and lots of pure water (assuming you could afford it).
While Graham's conclusions went against conventional medical wisdom, they left dominant assump-
tions about society unquestioned. Indeed, the fact that cholera struck first in cities' poorest quarters
seemed positive proof to him that moral failings fueled the outbreak. This view resonated with East
Coast elites eager to wash their hands of responsibility for the poor's suffering, but Graham didn't limit
his criticism to the poor Irish and blacks at the heart of the outbreak. Instead, he assailed all Americans'
addiction to debilitating foods. Meat eating was human violence and bestiality incarnate, he argued—the
embodiment of blood-dripping depravity. But the country's seemingly unstanchable craving for refined
flour was almost equally abhorrent. Although Graham grasped the importance of dietary fiber long be-
fore it was scientific common sense, his critique of white flour aimed much higher. Separating white
flour and bran, he preached, epitomized civilization's degenerate impulse to undo God's natural good-
ness. All food processing “put asunder what God has joined together,” in Graham's eyes, but refining
wheat ruptured God's perfect food. Refined wheat was a shattered covenant—the estrangement of hu-