Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Cholera cases popped up in Baltimore during the first week of August, but city officials did not publicly admit that an outbreak had begun until August 20. Residents knew well before then that the disease was at work, with white Baltimoreans seeing it as conforming to its predicted pattern: confining itself to the free African American neighbourhood in Ruxton Lane. The newspaper editor Peter Hoffman Cruse saw this as evidence of racial inferiority as he imagined people of color could not care for themselves. The outbreak exploded more widely during the first week of September as rains carried Vibrio to multiple water sources. Cholera proved to be a more universal killer than supposed and did not disappear from the city until mid-November. Frederick Douglass, then an enslaved fourteen-year-old resident of the city, lived through the outbreak and recalled it as a pivotal experience in his extraordinary life.</jats:p>