Analisi statistica della mortalità nell'epidemia colerica del 1836-37

The essay analyses the statistical data on cholera mortality in the the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, collected in Naples when the epidemic wave of 1836-37 was drawing to a close. On the basis of these figures, the government certainly had a clear perception of the incidence of the disease in the various districts, and could use them for appropriate health policy assessments. A choice that was made at the time, and which remained unchanged, was to secrete the statistical data collected. The motives behind this decision probably lay in the desire to conceal the very heavy death toll from public opinion at home and abroad, in an attempt to accredit the image of a wise, dynamic and effective government in containing the effects of the disease. There was perhaps also the fear that the internal disclosure of the real massacres that cholera had wrought, especially in certain provinces, could revive the never-quenched rumours of poisoning, with the related problems of public order, and the insidious political implications that cholera had provoked. For these reasons, the statistics collected remained buried in administrative offices and were never made public. Re-examined now, almost two centuries later, and interpreted also in the light of the distorting mechanisms that invalidated their compilation, The figures make it possible to ascertain the overall mortality in the Kingdom, the relationship between the mortality rates of the two epidemic waves and the mortality rates of the individual provinces. Among other things, they allow us to state that, although it was, chronologically, the last of the Italian states to experience the aggression of cholera, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was also the one that reported, at the end of the epidemic, the heaviest death toll, both in absolute values and in relation to the population.