The Lessons of Lexington

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Cholera did not disappear from the US at the end of 1832. It simmered among the plantations and towns of southern Louisiana. In the spring of 1833, it exploded into a third wave that encompassed the Trans-Appalachian West. Vibrio revisited New Orleans, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. Small towns such as Palmyra, Missouri, and Shelbyville, Tennessee, experienced some of the worst per capita losses of the entire pandemic. Mortality in Lexington, Kentucky, became widely reported not just for its sheer magnitude, but because some of the most respected people in the city fell. In its resurgence, cholera provided a strong case that it was not the disease that many imagined it to be.</jats:p>