The 1865 Cholera War: Parana, the La Plata, and a Forgotten Frontier

In this episode, Lucas and Luna travel back to 1865, when the Triple Alliance War was just beginning and the Paraná River became a highway for disease. While Paraguay's Francisco Solano López marshaled troops, cholera crept upriver from the Atlantic, hitting the Allied river fleet at Corrientes and then the Argentine city of Paraná. Lucas unpacks how an outbreak that killed thousands — including the Argentine doctor and statesman José María Rojas — was silenced by war, how the city's water system and quarantine practices shaped the response, and how the epidemic exposed the fragile sanitation infrastructure of a nation still consolidating after Caseros. Through the voices of nurses and soldiers, we explore the politics of blame, the role of British medicine, and the quiet transformation of public health in Argentina. A story of a crisis that history books often skip, told through the lens of a city that became a frontier between empires and microbes.

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