Jim Green, Librarian

In 18^th century North America, plague was non-existent and smallpox was horribly familiar, but yellow fever was a new horror. When it first appeared in Philadelphia in the abnormally hot summer of 1699, Isaac Norris called it the “Barbados distemper.” Quaker merchants were prominent in the sugar trade there and knew it well. Most historians now agree, however, that it did not originate in the West Indies, and that it had been brought there in slave ships from Africa. It was, in fact, a product of a new phenomenon, the diabolical combination of sugar and slavery that first appeared in Barbados.

Yellow fever thrived wherever there were lots of people, abundant trade, and warm climates where the mosquitoes that transmitted the disease could flourish. In the 18^th century it arrived every spring in Charleston and New Orleans, but over time their populations acquired some immunity, and it became a fact of life. Farther north in Philadelphia, only three more outbreaks are recorded up to 1762, leaving the city with very little immunity. When it struck again in 1793, for the first time in thirty years, the result was catastrophic. Ten percent of the population died.

As before it arrived by ship from the West Indies, but these ships carried not only sailors and sugar products but also refugees from St. Domingue (now Haiti). In that French colony, the slave and sugar economy had become the most lucrative capitalist enterprise in the world, until it imploded in a slave revolt in 1791. The refugees included people sick with yellow fever, as well as the mosquitos that transmitted it. This can only have intensified the outbreak.

Nicolas Ponce, engraver. [Four scenes of free and enslaved people in St Domingue. Paris, ca. 1795]. Library Company digital collections.

There was another characteristic of Philadelphia in 1793 that intensified the cultural impact of the epidemic: there were lots of physicians to write about it, and lots of printers to publish what they wrote. The 1699 visitation is known from a handful of private letters like Norris’s. In 1793, the sheer amount of reportage and controversy in newspapers and pamphlets swirling around the epidemic is astonishing, and we have it all on our shelves.

Benjamin Rush was the most argumentative of the doctors. He dismissed the widely held belief that the fever was imported and contagious, which it certainly was, and he advocated a treatment that included bleeding and purging, which was rejected by West Indian physicians who had experience with the disease. He also believed, initially, that black people were immune to it, whereas most of the Philadelphia black community had never been exposed and were no more immune than whites. But such was Rush’s prestige and his dogged self-assurance that the arguments he began in print in 1793 continued for a century.

Plaster cast of William Rush’s 1812 terracotta bust of Benjamin Rush. Bequest of James Rush, 1869. Library Company digital collections.

Mathew Carey was the publisher who did the most to disseminate information about the epidemic to Philadelphians and to the world at large. As a member of the committee that organized the city’s response to the epidemic, he had the standing to play this role. His Short Account of the Malignant Fever lately prevalent in Philadelphia, written just as the epidemic was abating, went rapidly through four editions. With most of the city’s newspapers shut down, the nation was largely ignorant of what was happening in its financial and political capital. One of his motives for publishing the pamphlet was to get word out to anyone who might be wondering why Philadelphians were not paying their bills, and in general to bolster confidence in the resilience of the city’s economy. Another motive was to get word out about who had died. Much of the Short Account consisted of page after page of names of the dead, over 4,000 of them in the fourth edition. Many bought the pamphlet just to find out if their loved ones in Philadelphia had survived.