Cholera and the maritime environment of Great Britain, India and the Suez Canal: 1866–1883

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After 1866, fears of the British Government that Egyptian and Ottoman International Quarantine Boards – comprising representatives of 13 mainland European member states plus Turkey, Egypt and Great Britain – would delay passage through the Suez Canal of vessels sailing ‘homeward’ from Bombay, had a devastating effect on cholera control policies in India and on scientific research in the UK. British policy contradicted the scientific findings of the Cholera Conference in Constantinople (1866) and the Vienna Conference (1874). The British held that Indian cholera was not a contagious disease, not caused by a germ (’germ theory’), not carried afield in the human gut. This was to deny the efficacy of quarantine. The result was to deter UK scientists from further work on ‘germ theory’.