Mavi Boncuk |Born: December 24, 1798, Zavosse, Belarus
Died: November 26, 1855, Constantinople
Mickiewicz was born in the Russian-partitioned territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which had been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and was active in the struggle to win independence for his home region. After, as a consequence, spending five years exiled to central Russia, in 1829 he succeeded in leaving the Russian Empire and, like many of his compatriots, lived out the rest of his life abroad. He settled first in Rome, then in Paris, where for a little over three years he lectured on Slavic literature at the Collège de France. He died, probably of cholera[1], at Constantinople in the Ottoman Empire, where he had gone to help organize Polish and Jewish forces to fight Russia in the Crimean War.
[1] CHOLERA (Cholera asiatica, Cholera indica), epidemic intestinal disease of Indian origin caused by infectious bacteria. In Persian cholera was usually called wabā (wabāʾ), the term for any epidemic disease, but sometimes also hayża, which was more correctly applied to clinically similar but relatively benign diseases with which cholera was frequently confused before the German Robert Koch (1843-1910) discovered the bacterium (cholera vibrio, Vibrio comma, Vibrio cholerae Pacini 1854; Howard-Jones, p. 20) in 1301/1884, for example, Cholera sporadica (wabā-ye pāʾīza “autumn cholera,” ṯeql-e sard “sporadic cholera”) and infant diarrheas (Cholera ablactatorum; Schlimmer, pp. 130-35; Polak, I, p. 196, II, p. 345). In fact, it is possible to recognize the first clear appearance of the disease in Persia in the first great pandemic, which broke out in India in 1232/1817 and reached Persia in 1236/1821. The second pandemic spread to Persia via Afghanistan, arriving in Tehran in Rabīʿ II 1245/October 1829 and in Rašt at the end of the year, before spreading to Baku and Astrakhan, even reaching St. Petersburg in 1831. The first wave of the third pandemic followed the same route (reaching Mašhad in 1260/1844, Tehran and Tabrīz at the end of 1261/1845, and Isfahan in Šaʿbān 1262/August 1846). It affected mainly cities in the north; those in the south escaped almost entirely. The disease then spread to Baghdad in the west and to Tiflis and Astrakhan in the northwest. The route by which the second wave spread is more obscure. SOURCE
By the spring of 1831, frequent reports of the spread of the pandemic in Russia prompted the British government to issue quarantine orders for ships sailing from Russia to British ports. By late summer, with the disease appearing more likely to spread to Britain, its Board of Health, in accordance with the prevailing miasma theory, issued orders recommending as a preventive the burning of "decayed articles, such as rags, cordage, papers, old clothes, hangings...filth of every description removed, clothing and furniture should be submitted to copious effusions of water, and boiled in a strong ley; drains and privies thoroughly cleansed by streams of water and chloride of lime...free and continued admission of fresh air to all parts of the house and furniture should be enjoined for at least a week".