11/23/2025
Throughout history, mail has been subject to treatments during misguided attempts to halt the spread of many different diseases, including yellow fever, smallpox, plague, typhus, cholera, diphtheria, measles, leprosy, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, influenza, and even mumps. Until the true nature of these diseases' causes and reach were identified, many health agencies viewed mail with suspicion. They believed that the letters and newspapers could carry a disease from infected areas into healthy ones.
A popular treatment was fumigation, through which mail and other paper items were perforated and scattered within a sealed chamber, then “disinfected” with strong doses of, most commonly, formaldehyde or sulfur dioxide fumes.
This cover was franked in Venice, Italy, on November 19, 1868, and bears numerous punctures associated with fumigation (the tiny black dots). An overwhelming pandemic of cholera from 1863–1875 claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, including some 50,000 Americans.
