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May 28, 2020 · Her interest was personal. In the summer of 1793 when a devastating yellow fever epidemic hit Philadelphia she was in the city, then the U.S. capital, as the wife of the president. Carey, a publisher and bookseller, was also there. He joined a committee that helped the poor and sick who stayed behind when the wealthy fled.
The Yellow Fever Epidemic in Philadelphia, 1793. Yellow fever is known for bringing on a characteristic yellow tinge to the eyes and skin, and for the terrible “black vomit” caused by bleeding into the stomach.
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Between August 1 and November 9, 1793, approximately 11,000 people contracted yellow fever in the US capital of Philadelphia. Of that number, 5,000 people, 10 percent of the city’s population, died. The disease gets its name from the jaundiced eyes and skin of the victims.
- Debate Over Yellow Fever's Causes
- The Well-To-Do Exit The City
- Controversial Treatment Methods
- Philadelphia's Free Black Community Care For The Sick
At the time, no one knew what caused yellow fever, or how it spread. Some thought it had been brought to Philadelphia by a ship bearing French refugees from a slave rebellion in Santo Domingo (now Haiti). Others—including the city’s leading physician, Dr. Benjamin Rush—believed it originated in the poor sanitary conditions and contaminated air of t...
Those who had the means to leave the city quickly did so, including Jefferson himself. President George Washington, who returned to his beloved Mount Vernon estate, blamed his exiton the concerns of his wife, Martha. Alexander Hamiltoncontracted yellow fever early in the epidemic, and he and his family left the city for their summer home a few mile...
Despite all his efforts, Rush had just a flawed understanding of yellow fever as anyone else at the time. His undeniably harsh treatments—including bloodletting, “Mercurial Sweating Powder,” and forced vomiting—did not curb the spread of the disease, and critics argued it only increased his patients’ suffering. These critics included Hamilton, who ...
"Parents desert their children as soon as they are infected, and in every room you enter you see no person but a solitary black man or woman near the sick,” Rush wrote to his wife, Julia, who was in Princeton, New Jersey, with the couple’s children, during the 1793 epidemic. “Many people thrust their parents into the street as soon as they complain...
- Sarah Pruitt
During the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic in Philadelphia, 5,000 or more people were listed in the register of deaths between August 1 and November 9. The vast majority of them died of yellow fever, making the epidemic in the city of 50,000 people one of the most severe in United States history. By the end of September, 20,000 people had fled the ...
Yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, 1793. Carriages rumbled through the streets to pick up the dying and the dead. Woodcut shows Stephen Girard on...
This 1797 map still depicts a city with neighborhoods clustered closer to the waterfront, where mosquitoes could easily spread yellow fever among the people of Philadelphia. Philadelphia proved an ideal climate for the spread of yellow fever in the summer of 1793.
