Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 - Government Responses To Crisis

Government Responses To Crisis

The responses of the various levels of government in the city varied. The Federal government had no authority to act and Congress had not been in session since June. President Washington and his cabinet continued to meet until he left the city on September 10 for his scheduled vacation, a period that included laying the cornerstone on September 18 of the new US Capitol to be built in the City of Washington, the designated capital. Employees of the Treasury Department, who collected customs and worked on the country's financial system, worked throughout the epidemic; the post office also stayed open.

The state legislature cut short its September session after a dead body was found on the steps of State House. Governor Mifflin became ill and was advised by his doctor to leave. The city's banks remained open. But, banking operations were so slowed by the inability of people to pay off notes because of disruptions from the epidemic that banks automatically renewed notes until the epidemic ended.

The mayor Matthew Clarkson organized the city's response to the epidemic. Most of the Common Council members fled, along with 20,000 other residents. People who did not leave Philadelphia before the second week in September could leave the city only with great difficulty, and they faced road blocks, patrols, inspections and quarantines. On September 12, Clarkson summoned fellow citizens interested in helping the Guardians of the Poor. They formed a committee to take over from the Guardians and address the crisis.

On the 14th, Clarkson was joined by 26 men, who formed committees to reorganize the fever hospital, arrange visits to the sick, feed those unable to care for themselves, and arrange for wagons to carry the sick to the hospital and the dead to Potter's Field. The Committee acted quickly: after a report of 15-month-old twins being orphaned, two days later the Committee had identified a house for sheltering the growing number of orphans. As noted above, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones offered the services of members of the Free African Society to the Committee.

When the Mayor's Committee inspected the Bush Hill fever hospital, they found the nurses unqualified and arrangements chaotic. "The sick, the dying, and the dead were indiscriminately mingled together. The ordure and other evacuations of the sick, were allowed to remain in the most offensive state imaginable... It was, in fact, a great human slaughter-house." On September 15, Peter Helm, a barrel maker, and Stephen Girard, a merchant and shipowner born in France, volunteered to personally manage the hospital and represent the Mayor's Committee.

They made rapid improvements in hospital operations: bedsteads were repaired and more brought from the prison so patients would not have to lie on the floor. A barn was adapted as a place for convalescing patients. On September 17, the managers hired 9 female nurses and 10 male attendants, as well as a female matron. They assigned the 14 rooms to separate male and female patients. With the discovery of a spring on the estate, workers were organized to have clean water pumped into the hospital. Helm and Girard informed the Committee that they could accommodate more than the 60 patients then under their care, and soon the hospital had 140 patients.

Girard found that the intermittent visits by four young physicians from the city added to the confusion about patient treatment. He hired Jean Deveze, a French doctor with experience treating yellow fever in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). Deveze cared only for the patients at the hospital, and he was assisted by French apothecaries. Deveze admired Girard's fearlessness in his devotion to the patients. In a memoir published in 1794, Deveze wrote of Girard:

"I even saw one of the diseased... the contents of his stomach upon . What did Girard do? ...He wiped the patient's cloaths, comforted ...arranged the bed, inspired with courage, by renewing in him the hope that he should recover. ---From him he went to another, that vomited offensive matter that would have disheartened any other than this wonderful man."

News that patients treated at the hospital were recovering, encouraged many people to believe that medicine was gaining control of the fever. But, it soon became clear that mortality at the hospital remained high; about 50% died of those admitted.