THEY PALED AND STOOD STILL AS STATUES

The cholera in Icó city, province of Ceará (1862)

Abstract

The article starts from memorialistc reports about the cholera that reached Icó city, in 1862. On them, the illness is presented as the initial chapter of economic decay and the loss of political influence of the locality. The memorialists affirm that the disease killed half of the population in the occasion. Likewise, the reports show the doctor Pierre Théberge as the hero of the epidemic square, to the point of to die because of the cholera, while trying to help the patients of another outbreak, in 1864. Through the manuscripts and newspapers, I demonstrate how the local memory inflated the demographic impact of the epidemic in the location. I provide a narrative of the crisis days, especially indicating the effects about the local daily: a time of fear and social tensions. From the presentation of epidemical drama, I search to indicate evidences of what took the cholera to remain being active in the local memory almost a hundred and sixty years later.