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The first major American yellow fever epidemic hit Philadelphia in July 1793 and peaked during the first weeks of October. Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital, was the most cosmopolitan city in the United States.
Oct 18, 2022 · But the nation’s history has now been bookended by two great outbreaks. The first began when yellow fever struck Philadelphia in 1793, killing 5,000 of the city’s 50,000 inhabitants, and continued to 1805 in a series of terrifying epidemics that scourged New York and Philadelphia.
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In 1793 in Philadelphia, a “malignant fever” struck with a vengeance, eventually killing approximately 10 percent of the city’s population.
At the time, it was thought that yellow fever was caused by rotting vegetable matter, and it was believed to be contagious; the disease is actually spread by mosquitos. | Between August 1 and November 9, 1793, approximately 11,000 people contracted yellow fever in the US capital of Philadelphia.
- 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
They spread westward where patients were bled and purged for another half-century. Although yellow fever remained mysterious, by 1800, many physicians thought it was imported and quasi-contagious in nature. However, the infecting agent remained unknown.
The yellow fever epidemic of 1793 was the first and deadliest outbreak in a series of yellow fever epidemics that forced Americans in and outside of Philadelphia to rethink how United States citizens responded to the disease.
