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Curated features. About. 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.
- 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
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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.
May 28, 2020 · Between 1793 and 1805, waves of yellow fever attacked northern ports in the U.S. Then the disease retreated south, where it persisted through the end of the 19th century. At the turn of the 20th century, a time of great advances in bacteriology, scientists discovered that yellow fever was transmitted by the bite of an infected mosquito.
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.
Mar 4, 2016 · In 1793, the Aedes aegypti mosquito carried yellow fever from the tropics to Philadelphia, killing 10 percent of the population and forcing much of the rest - including President George Washington and his entire government - to flee. by Don Sapatkin, STAFF WRITER. Published Mar. 4, 2016, 5:38 p.m. ET. In 1793, the Aedes aegypti mosquito carried ...
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