Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 - Histories of The Epidemic

Histories of The Epidemic

In the first week of September 1793, Dr. William Currie published a description of the epidemic and an account of its progress during August. The publisher Mathew Carey had an account of the epidemic for sale in the third week of October, before the epidemic had ended. He accused blacks of causing the epidemic and black nurses of overcharging patients and taking advantage of them. The reverends Richard Allen and Absalom Jones of the Free African Society published their own account rebutting Carey's attacks; by that time Carey had already published the fourth edition of his popular pamphlet. Allen and Jones noted that some blacks had worked for free, that they had died at the same rate as whites from the epidemic, and that some whites had also overcharged for their services.

Currie's work was the first of several medical accounts published within a year of the epidemic. Dr. Benjamin Rush published an account more than 300 pages long. Two French doctors, Jean Deveze and Nassy, published shorter accounts. Clergymen also published accounts; the most notable was by the Lutheran minister J. Henry C. Helmuth. In March 1794, the Mayor's Committee published its minutes. (Letters written during the epidemic, which in some cases expressed the last sentiments of victims, were preserved by many families and have been a source for scholars in various archives.)

The rapid succession of other yellow fever epidemics in Philadelphia and elsewhere in the northeastern United States engendered many accounts of the efforts to contain, control and cope with the disease. Rush wrote accounts of the 1797, 1798, and 1799 epidemics in Philadelphia. He revised his account of the 1793 epidemic to eliminate reference to the disease being contagious. He varied his cures. In 1798 he was appointed as the chief doctor at the fever hospital. The mortality rate that year was roughly the same as it had been at Bush Hill in 1793, despite radical difference between the therapies used.

Noah Webster, then a notable New York newspaper publisher, joined two doctors in publishing the Medical Repository, a magazine that collected accounts of fever epidemics throughout the nation. Webster used this data in his 1798 book, suggesting that the nation was being subjected to a wide spread "epidemic constitution" in the atmosphere that might last 50 years and make deadly epidemics almost certain. Yellow fever epidemics became seen as a national crisis. When in 1855 a French doctor published an 813-page history of yellow fever in Philadelphia, covering outbreaks from 1699 to 1854, he devoted only a few pages to the 1793 epidemic.

General 20th-century US histories, such as the 10-volume Great Epochs in American History, published in 1912, used short excerpts from Carey's account. The first history of the epidemic to draw on more primary sources was J. H. Powell's Bring Out Your Dead (1949), but he did not use the personal letters, which are largely held by Quaker colleges in the area. While Powell did not write a scholarly history of the epidemic, his work reviewed its historical importance. Since the mid-twentieth century, scholars have studied aspects of the epidemic, first in papers. For example, Martin Pernick's "Politics, Parties, and Pestilence: Epidemic Yellow Fever in Philadelphia and the Rise of the First Party System," developed statistical evidence to show that Republican doctors generally used Rush's therapies and Federalist doctors used Kuhn's.

Scholars celebrated the 200th anniversary of the epidemic with the publication of papers on various aspects of the epidemic. A 2004 paper in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine reexamined Rush's use of bleeding.