ABSTRACT
The massive dislocation brought about by the transformation of agrarian into industrial societies in the nineteenth century produced its own patterns of epidemic invasions. Epidemic diseases caused massive levels of mortality in the first industrial society in the nineteenth century, and yet population growth soared Woods and Woodward. Towards the end of the nineteenth century Britain began to see a dramatic decline in premature mortality and increased length of the average life. Typhus became a disease that the migrant poor always had with them, but among epidemic disasters of the nineteenth century cholera was king. Apart from war, the increasing mobility of population through the expansion of trade during the nineteenth century was the most important vehicle for the spread of cholera. Nineteenth-century cholera epidemics drew out the contrasting cultures which lay on either side of the Atlantic.
