The Cholera Epidemic of 1853

Four months

It started in Nyboder on 11 June 1853 and was over by October. Of 7,219 people infected, 4,737 died. A mortality rate of 56.7 per cent means that catching it was close to a coin toss, and the city inside the walls was densely built, badly drained and had nowhere to put anybody.

What the epidemic changed

More than the plague of 1711 did, in practical terms. The outbreak directly caused the decommissioning of Copenhagen's fortifications, which had kept the city compressed inside its ramparts, and it produced Brumleby in 1857, Denmark's first social housing. The modern shape of the city — the fact that it could spread outwards at all — starts with 4,737 deaths in one summer.

Where the dead went

Assistens Cemetery had been open since 1760, laid out to relieve the churchyards inside the walls after the plague of 1711. By 1853 it was fashionable rather than a pauper's ground, and Copenhageners took picnic baskets and tea there on excursions. It is now 25 hectares of public park in Nørrebro that is also a working burial ground: the Assistens Cemetery page.

The people who handled the bodies during outbreaks like this one were the natmænd, the men the city counted dishonourable for doing exactly the work it could not do without. Their Danish-language walk meets at the Absalon statue on Højbro Plads — see the nightmen page.

Where it sits in the sequence

1853 is the last of the four catastrophes that shaped this city. The plague of 1711 took about 20,000 people, the fire of 1728 took 47% of the medieval core, the Royal Navy burned the cathedral in 1807, and cholera closed the account in 1853. After that Copenhagen stopped being a walled city and started being a modern one. The guided ghost walk covers the sequence in an hour and a half from Nytorv: the guided ghost walk.

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