While Paris climbed toward the height of its urban and industrial growth, two cholera outbreaks ravaged the capital, one in 1832, the other in 1849. Infecting one in approximately nineteen inhabitants, the first epidemic claimed over eighteen thousand lives; in the second, one in twenty-eight caught the disease and over twenty thousand died.

Despite the similarity of the epidemics, the first outbreak received far greater attention in the press, popular literature, and personal accounts; it even provoked a series of grisly riots among angry members of the lower classes, who saw cholera as a plot by doctors and government officials to assassinate them.

How is it that during the late 1840s, the very time when class had become the dominant framework for interpreting social experience in France, cholera - the quintessential disease of class difference in 1832 - was no longer understood in these terms? In this cultural history, Catherine Kudlick unravels the mystery.