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From the Center for the History of Medicine in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine. 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. Two thousand free Black people ...
May 28, 2020 · The yellow fever epidemics that struck American cities soon after the birth of the nation left a powerful mark in the historical record. That mark is visible in books, newspapers, maps and more at the Library, but especially in the papers of members of George Washington’s administration.
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5. New Orleans; Summer 1853; 8000 or more dead. This outbreak illustrated a racial disparity in yellow fever mortality; 7.4% of white residents died, but only 0.2% of blacks. 6. Norfolk; June-Oct ...
- American Experience
- 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
mso-bidi-language:#0400;} Yellow fever disrupted the federal government, divided the medical establishment and destroyed the lives of thousands of Philadelphians in the disastrous epidemic of 1793, one of many in cities around the world until the cause of the disease was identified at the beginning of the 20 th century.
Reports on the yellow fever epidemic, 1793. 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.
Feb 26, 2021 · It was 1795, and the yellow fever—which had burned through Philadelphia two years earlier, killing more than 10 percent of the city’s population—had arrived in New York. It would return in 1798, and those two epidemics killed between 3,000 and 3,500 New Yorkers.
