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- Sandy Hingston
- Though an effective vaccine now exists, yellow fever still kills some 30,000 people every year, about 90 percent of them in Africa. A bout of the disease typically begins with fever and chills, after which the patient seems to recover.
- Philadelphians initially blamed the 1793 outbreak, which started with two deaths in August, on shiploads of refugees from the French colony of Saint-Domingue on Hispaniola, who were escaping that island’s slave revolution.
- Philadelphia was considered the hottest and dampest of all the cities on the Atlantic seacoast — even worse than Charleston or Savannah. The city was surrounded by marshes and swamps.
- Among the recommendations for staving off the fever were smoking tobacco, cleaning the house and/or one’s person with vinegar, carrying a tarred rope, covering the floors of rooms with a two-inch-deep layer of dirt (to be replaced daily), chewing garlic, hanging a bag of camphor around one’s neck, and lighting bonfires and/or setting off guns in the streets.
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. Known today to be spread by infected mosquitoes, yellow fever was long believed to be a miasmatic disease originating in rotting vegetable matter and other putrefying filth, and ...
Feb 3, 2023 · On October 11, 1793, 100 people had been reported dead as a result of the virus. Within weeks that number would change to 100 people dying of yellow fever per day. According to History, the situation got so bad for the city that the local government couldn't function any longer. Restrictions were instituted, but the virus still ran unchecked.
- Jesse Gormley
- 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
Nov 13, 2009 · 1793. Yellow fever breaks out in Philadelphia. The death toll from a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia hits 100 on October 11, 1793. By the time it ended, 5,000 people were dead....
Between August and November 1793, yellow fever upended the United States’ temporary capital, bringing commerce to a halt, crippling the city’s government, and killing over 5,000 of the city’s 50,000 inhabitants.
Yellow fever is a Flavivirus that spreads among humans via the bite of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Once introduced to a human host, the virus begins replicating in the lymph nodes. Initial symptoms include aches and pains, fever, nausea, and dizziness, lasting several days before receding.
