Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Cholera continued to circulate throughout the Northeast from July into October 1832. It produced especially appalling deaths tolls in hospitals, almshouses, prisons, and jails. Philadelphia’s Arch Street Prison was the most well-known site of the pandemic’s mass mortality, but Vibrio infiltrated other places of incarceration, sometimes gradually and sometimes explosively taking lives. Impoverished people who appeared ill or whose poverty marked them as cholera’s desired prey were incarcerated in places where the bacteria thrived to spare the respectable population of horrid scenes. The poor, especially Irish immigrants, resisted coerced hospitalization and the quick, unceremonious burials of their deceased, with a riot in Utica gaining national attention. The press and municipal officials dismissed the resistance as the superstitious prejudice against medical authority and dehumanized the impoverished as deserving victims of a selective disease.</jats:p>