Three cholera hospitals were provided in Manchester, at which about one-half of all the cases were received:
| Cases | Deaths | |||
| Swan Street Hospital | 443 | 234 | ||
| Knott Mill Hospital | 242 | 122 | ||
| Chorlton on Medlock Hospital | 29 | 17 | ||
| At their homes | 697 | 335 |
In Salford all the patients were treated at their homes—644 with 197 deaths; there were also 60 cases among the prisoners in the New Bailey, with 19 deaths.
The Swan Street Hospital was the occasion of a remarkable cholera riot on the 2nd of September. A mob numbering several thousand persons filled the streets near the hospital; in the thick of it was carried a small coffin, from which the headless trunk of a child was taken at intervals and shown to the crowd. The child had died of cholera in the hospital and the body had been examined post mortem. Some rumours of this had gone abroad, the body was exhumed, and was found unaccountably mangled. This was the time when intense feeling had been roused all over the country by the procuring of bodies for anatomical dissection, the prejudice extending to the ordinary pathological inspection also. At Sunderland the holding of two or three necropsies had turned the people against the Cholera Hospital. At Dublin there was a rigid rule that no body was to be examined after death in the great cholera hospital of some 700 beds. The body of the child exhumed at Manchester had been found with the head severed, and the rioters declared that it had been murdered. They broke into the hospital, carried off the patients to their homes, and wrecked the furniture and fittings of the wards. The military was at length called out to clear the streets[1528].
The epidemic of cholera at Bristol reproduced most of the incidents at other places. There had been numerous suspicious cases of choleraic disease in the early summer, including an outbreak in the gaol in the first week of July.
The first unequivocal cases occurred on the 11th July in a filthy court, in strangers from Bath where there was then no cholera. About the same time the infection showed itself at several places apart, especially in the destitute suburb of St Philip, in the south-east of the city. One of the worst centres was the city Poorhouse, in which 268 cases with 94 deaths occurred from the 24th July to the 20th August. The largest number of seizures on one day was 79 on the 17th August, the largest number of deaths 33 on the 15th. After that it gradually declined, and was over by the middle of November. The attacks reported were 1612, the deaths 626; but these figures came short of the truth, as many cases were not reported, and the burials from all causes were in excess of the average for the season after deducting the reported cholera deaths. Although it fell at Bristol, as elsewhere, upon the poorest quarters and the most abandoned or destitute class, yet it showed caprices among these. Marsh Street, the abode of the lower Irish, and one of the most thickly peopled parts of the city, was the last place visited. Lewin’s Mead, a low and crowded quarter, had only a few scattered cases[1529].
Little is known of the great epidemic in Plymouth, Devonport, and East Stonehouse, beyond the gross result that it caused 1063 deaths in the town and the two dockyards[1530]. Of the outbreak at Southampton not even the figures are known, the only important omission, besides the epidemic at Salisbury, in the whole of the cholera of 1832. On the other hand the Exeter cholera has been related at greater length than any[1531].
It was mainly an autumnal outbreak, the largest number of attacks on one day being 89 on the 13th August, and the maximum daily burials 30 a few days before. The total attacks were 1135, the deaths 345; they were chiefly in the south-western suburb of the city, among the poorer class, the two St Mary parishes having 3·65 and 3·26 per cent. of their population attacked, the parish of St George 3·41, St John 2·73, and Trinity 1·54, while two whole parishes had no cases.
Somewhat late in the autumn the infection spread through Cornwall. Its general prevalence was also late in the South Wales mining district (insignificant compared with its enormous ravages there in the next cholera of 1849) and in Carlisle, in Whitehaven and the other seaports of Cumberland. Hartlepool, for all its nearness to the original centre of cholera infection in Sunderland, was one of the last places to be infected, in the autumn of 1832[1532].
The Central Board of Health made no report upon the cholera of 1832, unless a document sent to the king (William IV.) may have consisted of something more than the alphabetical list of infected places, with dates and numbers, which Sir James Clark found some years after in a drawer of the royal library. But some lessons of the epidemic were obvious without the aid of an official report. The late summer and autumn was undoubtedly its chief season—except in places where the poison had, as it were, spent itself in the winter or early spring, such as Sunderland and Musselburgh. A subsidence and seeming extinction of the epidemic in spring and early summer was observed at Glasgow and Edinburgh as well as in London; but it was far otherwise in Paris, where sixteen thousand deaths occurred in the single month of April[1533]. As to locality, the infection seemed to prefer low grounds, such as the shore quarters of seaports and the banks of rivers. The town moor of Sunderland, around which the infection found its first habitat in Britain, appeared to be a typical cholera soil—a wet bottom of tenacious clay, almost impassable in winter from the water standing in it, the surface covered with heaps of excremental and other refuse from the crowded lanes near it. But the greatest centre of cholera in England in 1832, the town of Bilston, seemed to be the reverse of this—a rising ground from which the water had been drained away by the numerous mines of coal, iron and limestone all round it. Again, in towns or villages built upon a slope or on heights and hollows, such as Gateshead, Newburn and Collieston (most of all in Quebec on the steep bank of the St Lawrence), the infection did not confine itself to the lower part only. But it was remarked that among the Tyneside villages several on high ground escaped altogether, although within a mile or two of others severely visited. This question of elevation comes up more definitely in the cholera of 1849.