This is a study of how scientific knowledge reached common citizens in nineteenth-century Portugal, using newspapers as the main source. Despite the population's limited access to written material, each leading newspaper might be read by 30 000 people a day in Lisbon. This made newspapers the most widely available vehicle for the diffusion of the latest scientific information to the general public. With a cholera morbus epidemic affecting the second largest Portuguese town and all the northern

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... egions, as well as the Algarve, reports on the course of the epidemic were considered essential. The author bases her study on a database of news about the disease in 1855 and 1856, especially with regard to prevention and treatment. Cucumbers, prunes, poorly seasoned fruits, which our peasants, not through hunger but out of vice and reprehensible abuse, will not stop eating . . .. O Século no. 109 (1855) The quotation above shows the arguments used to deny the cholera morbus epidemic in midnineteenth-century Portugal. They implied that people, especially the poor, were responsible for their own sickness and were paying the price for their depraved behaviour. It was summer and very hot, and peasants were exposed to too much sun, which was deadly. These, and not cholera, were supposed to be the real causes for their condition. In fact, people were allegedly suffering mostly from cholerine, typhus or simple gastritis, rather than from the 'guest from the Ganges', as cholera was later called. 'Dysenteries are frequent during the summer, particularly among the poor classes, because of excessive work and the abuse of noxious fruits, which this particular class uses too much'. 1 Therefore all sanitary measures, especially quarantine and prohibitions on trade, were unnecessary, and freedom of commerce should be re-established.