The day before Christmas Eve 1831 was one set to go down in history as the day the Second Cholera Pandemic first and fatally touched Scotland. In Victorian Scotland, cholera was a frightening and little-understood killer. Only three years after the beginning of the worldwide pandemic, the bacterial disease – spread via infected water supplies – made its way from Russia and China to Britain, courtesy of a ship landing at the English port of Sunderland laden with infected persons from the Baltic States.
