October 25: Fighting Against Cholera

Waldemar Haffkine, a Russian-born bacteriologist who developed a vaccine against cholera, died on this date in 1930. Haffkine was a member of the Narodnaya Volya revolutionary movement and Jewish self-defense organizations in Tsarist Russia before emigrating to Switzerland in 1888. In 1893, during a terrible outbreak of cholera in India, Haffkine went there and inoculated 25,000 people, which reduced the death rate among them by 70 percent. (During his time in India, he also survived an assassination attempt by Islamic extremists.) Haffkine next tried to develop a vaccine against bubonic plague; it proved to be about 50 percent effective. Haffkine tested these vaccines, which were made of attenuated infectious organisms and had nasty side effects, on himself. By the end of the century, he was appointed director of the Plague Laboratory in Bombay, now called the Haffkine Institute. Late in his life, Haffkine became an Orthodox Jew a public advocate of traditional religious observance; in 1929, a year before his death, he established the Haffkine Foundation to foster Jewish education in Eastern Europe.

“The government of His Imperial Majesty prefers peasants to die with a prayer for the tsar on their lips than to owe their lives to a Jew.” —Message of the Russian government, delivered to Waldemar Haffkine after he offered his assistance to Russia during a cholera outbreak in Russia, in 1892. The outbreak took a quarter of a million Russian lives.