Roy Porter

Cherished among the bastions of our ‘invisible constitution’ is the political cartoon, the people’s daily retort to ministerial humbug and opposition hypocrisy. If the pen is mightier than the sword, the sharpest pen is surely the cartoonist’s: one palpable hit from him will do more than months of routine pounding from lumbering leader-writers. This may be common knowledge. But is it true? After all, media experts of every hue – and not just those who see the press as the poodle of the powerful – have long been questioning the radical potential of mass culture. Many enjoin scepticism towards all assumptions about the ‘influence’ of print (and, by extension, ‘prints’) upon people’s minds. Others stress how the mass reproduction of images produces apathy, the anaesthesia of familiarity. Institutionalise criticism, and you draw its sting.’

Years ago Sir John Plumb declared: ‘The past is dead.’ He didn’t add: ‘long live history.’ But try as historians will to put the past behind them, others are always resurrecting it and abusing it for their own purposes. Take the mindless mouthings of ‘Victorian values’, the ‘good’ (or the ‘bad’) old days, the Dunkirk spirit, the ghost of Ramsay MacDonald – in all such sloganising, the ghosts of the past are conjured up to clinch arguments about the present. And in no field, paradoxically, is this ancestral magic so pervasive as in science – above all, in myth-making introductions to scientific textbooks. There the ritual incantation of deities and devils – with Galileo, Newton, Darwin worshipped on the one side, and Descartes, Lamarck, Lysenko anathematised on the other – provides exemplars to imitate and moral lessons to avoid. Each science, of course, boasts its own dramatis personae for the performance of these hagiographical and exorcistic rituals. Amongst geologists, the villain-in-chief, endlessly execrated, is the Rev. Thomas Burnet. Leading the heroes home are James Hutton and Sir Charles Lyell.’

You only have to read the torrent of filthy abuse pouring out of this diatribe against sex and men to see that Andrea Dworkin is a sick lady. It’s one long hysterical denunciation of sexual intercourse as really bad news for women. The way she rants on is of course the give-away symptom of sexual frustration. Clearly she can’t be getting enough of it – not surprising for someone overweight and ugly like her! Either that, or she is one of the seven in ten women (evidence: Hite Report) who can’t regularly make it to orgasm with a man. Typically of such women, her frustration has turned her into a man-hater. It’s awful being a man in today’s world. It means being bombarded with androcidal aggression from women who love to hate us.’

In mid-August 1892, Hamburg was basking in a heatwave. Workers splashed around in the River Elbe, which reached an almost unprecedented 70 °F. Then people started to go down with intestinal pains, spasms, vomiting, diarrhoea. Most of them died. The death rate climbed. At the back of their minds the city’s medical officers and doctors nursed a dark fear that it was cholera: but surely that was impossible. Having spread from India and ravaged Europe in a series of terrifying epidemics from the 1830s onwards, cholera had mercifully receded, and by 1870 was but a bogey of the bad old days. How could proud and prosperous Hamburg, with its modern system of piped water and sanitation, become the hotbed of an Asiatic disease? A cholera epidemic was unthinkable: it would entail isolation, quarantine, a trade embargo, financial ruin. The doctors talked about isolated instances of vomiting, and uttered soothing noises: why create a panic? Panic would not only produce a run on the exchange but would actually render people more susceptible to the disease – whatever it was. But the number of the cases rose from tens to hundreds, and then turned to thousands. Within six weeks, ten thousand Hamburgers had died of what nobody could any longer deny was cholera. The City had pursued its policy of silence and inactivity up to the very last moment, afraid to admit the truth, petrified of having to spend money. If its Senate had required the boiling of drinking water at an early stage, as bacteriologists recommended, thousands would have been spared. But the City was proud of its water. And in any case, its medical authorities did not believe in the bacteriological doctrine that water-borne bacilli were to blame – they didn’t even believe such bacilli existed.’