THE YELLOW FEVER AND THE BLACK VOMIT
An infectious virus, according to Peter Medewar, is a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news. This is what the virus carried by the female Culicidae Aëdes aegypti mosquito, causing what was known as black vomit,
the American plague, yellow jacket, bronze John, dock fever, stranger’s fever (now standardized as the “yellow fever”) actually looks like, Disney-colorized for your entertainment:
And this is what the infectious virus causing Rubeola, the incredibly deadly and devastating German measles, looks like, likewise Disney-colorized for your entertainment:
Most infectious viruses have fewer than 10 genes, although the virus that caused the small pox was the biggie exception, having from 200 to 400 genes:
Then, of course, there is the influenza, which exists in various forms as different sorts of this virus mutate and migrate from time to time from other species into humans — beginning with an “A” variety that made the leap from wild ducks to domesticated ducks circa 2500 BCE.
(And then there is our little friend the coma bacillus Vibrio cholerae, that occasionally makes its way from our privies into our water supplies and causes us to come down with the “Asiatic cholera.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX
BLACK VOMIT THE YELLOW FEVER
On the other hand, the scarlet fever, also referred to as Scarlatina, is an infection caused not by a virus but by one or another of the hemoglobin-liberating bacteria, typically Streptococcus pyogenes. What did the insightful Herman Melville and little ward-of-the- state Laura Bridgman have in common? —their eyes had been damaged by scarlet fever.
TB, referred to in the 19th Century by such terms as phthisis, is an infection caused by the bacillus Mycobacterium tuberculosis which contains 4,411,529 coded aminos in the about 4,000 genes of its genome.
A common error nowadays is to presume that tuberculosis affected only the lungs. It did not then and it does not now. It can settle in just about any part of the body, causing abscesses and crippling the bones and causing atrophy of the musculature. Humans can contract a human form of tuberculosis or a bovine form. One of the challenges of the 19th Century was to put a number of apparently quite different ailments together, and come to recognize that they were in fact not different diseases, but various forms taken by TB.
COMPARING 19TH-CENTURY WITH 21ST-CENTURY TERMINOLOGY: Lung Sickness, Consumption = tuberculosis Galloping Consumption = pulmonary tuberculosis Phthisis Pulmonalis = wasting away of a body part Pott’s Disease = tuberculosis of the spinal vertebrae Scrofula = tuberculosis of lymph nodes or glands of neck
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Bubonic plague is caused by the bacillus Yersina pestis is an infection which is transmitted from rats to humans by the rat flea Xenopsylla cheopsis.
Malaria is a relapsing infection characterized by chills and fever, caused by various protozoa of the genus Plasmodium introduced into the bloodstream of reptiles, of birds, and of mammals such as humankind by the Culicidae Anopheles mosquito.
(HINT: If you ever want to “go there,” click on one of these icons. Fear not, these are mere virtual viruses.)
According to Jared Diamond, native American populations were more affected by the germs of the European intrusives simply because they had had lesser contact with the domesticated species and their diseases:
“The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history –small pox, influenza, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera– are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals, even though most of the microbes responsible for our own epidemic illnesses are paradoxically now almost confined to humans.... [They] evolved out of diseases of Eurasian herd animals that became domesticated. Whereas many such animals existed in Eurasia, only five animals of any sort became domesticated in the Americas [due to the] ... paucity of wild starting material.” — Jared Diamond, GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL: THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES (NY: W.W. Norton, 1997, pages 196ff
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16TH CENTURY
1590
January 28, before dawn: In the Caribbean, Sir Francis Drake had been stricken by a tropical disease known at the time as the “bloody flux,” which perhaps was the yellow fever. He was rising from his sickbed aboard his flagship Defiance to don his armor in order to die as a soldier, and collapsed back onto the cot. The body would be encased in a lead coffin and consigned to the deeps off Puerto Bello, Panama:
Chronological observations of America to the year of Christ 1673.
Sir Martin Frobisher Commander of the English Fleet slain in the quarrel of H. King of Navarr.
The last voyage of Sir Francis Drake, and Sir John Hawkins to the West-Indies with six ships of the Queens, and twelve other ships and Barks containing 2400 men and boyes, in which voyage they both dyed, and Sir Francis Drake’s Coffen was thrown over board near Porto bello.
From the year of World BY John Josselyn Gent.
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17TH CENTURY
1600
Fall: Isaac Norris, Sr. recorded that there had been in Philadelphia a great yellow fever epidemic in which five members of his own family had died: “This is quite the Barbadoes distemper: they void and vomit blood. There is not a day nor night has passed for several weeks, but we have the account of the death or sickness of some friend or neighbour. It hath been sometimes very sickly, but I never before knew it so mortal as now; nine persons lay dead in one day at the same time; very few recover. All business and trade down. The fall itself was extremely moderate and open.”
1648
The yellow fever, a monkey/mosquito virus of West Africa, had at this point made its way to Havana and to the Yucatan peninsula.
1683
The 1st microscope having come along in 1590 and the 1st glimpse of microorganisms having been obtained in 1676, in this year improvements in precision allowed bacteria to be viewed for the 1st time.
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1686
The yellow fever struck in Brazil.
1690
The yellow fever struck in Mozambique.
1699
Proprietor William Penn had been away from his colony of Pennsylvania for all of 15 years, but in this year, at the age of 55, he was able to return. (His wife, and his daughter Laetitia, had been attempting to intercept such a return from the courts of Europe into the hostile wilderness. He had, however, the intention of settling there for the rest of his life.) The family’s ocean voyage required all of three months, and when they arrived, the yellow fever, which had been raging in the West Indies, was raging also in Philadelphia. Public Friend (traveling Quaker minister) Thomas Story described this as a time when “Great was the fear that fell on all flesh. I saw no lofty or airy countenance, — nor heard any vain jesting: — but every face gathered paleness, and many hearts were humbled.”
18TH CENTURY
1702
An outbreak of the yellow fever devastated New-York, with 570 deaths.
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1703
Isaac Norris, Sr. recorded that the yellow fever became in this year a scourge in New-York “such as they had never seen before! Some hundreds died, and many left the town for many weeks, so that the town was almost left desolate.” Friend Thomas Story, the city’s recorder, also reported on this calamity, as a scourge which carried off 6-8 inhabitants daily: “Great was the fear that fell upon all flesh! I saw no lofty or airy countenances, nor heard any vain jesting; but every face gathered paleness, and many hearts were humbled.” About 220 New- Yorkers died, of whom about 80 or 90 were his fellow Quakers.
1730
The yellow fever struck Cadiz, Spain, a port heavily engaged in trade with the Spanish colonies of the New World.
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1741
June-October: 250 persons died during a season of great sickness in Philadelphia. The infection was being referred to as the “Palantine distemper” due to its prevailing among German emigrants, perhaps from their confinement on ship. Noah Webster would record that after the severe winter, the city was severely visited with “the American plague.” The disease, Doctor Bond offered, was the yellow fever, supposed to have been introduced by a load of sick people from Dublin.
1743
Yellow fever again prevailed in Philadelphia and New-York. The case of Joel Neaves, who died in Philadelphia, was described as follows: “He had a true, genuine yellow fever, with black vomit and spots, and suppression of urine — all this from overheating himself in a very hot day, by rowing a boat. He also gave it to others about him, and they to others; yet but few of them died.”
1762
The yellow fever struck Philadelphia, but this time the impact was relatively minor. The enormous impact would not appear until 1793, when the city was our new national capital. Benjamin Rush began his scholarly work by translating Hippocrates’s APHORISMS into English. In addition, in this year, the 17-year-old made OBSERVATIONS ON YELLOW FEVER.
1764
The yellow fever struck hard at Philadelphia.
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1767
The Reverend Joseph Priestley devised carbonated water, hoping it would prevent the yellow fever.
The Reverend Priestley’s book on science, THE HISTORY AND PRESENT STATE OF ELECTRICITY, put forward the concept that the history of science was important because it showed how human intelligence discovers and directs the forces of nature, as well as illustrating the general progress of humankind.
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1791
October 8: A notice appeared in the American Weekly Mercury, that Andrew Bradford in Philadelphia owned a very likely Negro Woman who was available to be purchased, and that this piece of merchandise was aged about 28 years, and fit for Country or City Business. The notice went on to describe this slave in more detail, as a person able to card, spin, knit, and milk as well as perform any other sort of country work:
A notice also appeared to the effect that Samuel Kirk in the Second Street of Philadelphia had a Negro Woman who was available to be purchased, but added no details in regard to this piece of merchandise other than that she was young:
During this period the yellow fever was rampant in the city. Mortalities in the period from August to November inclusive would total to 4,002.
1792
From this year into 1799 the yellow fever would be epidemic in Santo Domingo, Haiti, and the West Indies.
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1793
The yellow fever, carried by French refugees from the epidemic in the Caribbean, struck this capital city. I approached a house before which stood a hearse. Presently a coffin borne by two men issued from the house.
Several of Philadelphia’s doctors fled to the Poconos for their own safety, but Dr. Benjamin Rush cared too much for his patients to imitate their personal cowardice.
Because white people were tending to pay no attention at all when a person of color died, people of color of course being of no particular importance, at this point in time there was a very prevalent myth that African blacks were quite immune to the yellow fever. Also, at this point in time, the system of human enslavement was being phased out of operation in Pennsylvania. The consequence of these two factoids was that there was a 2,500-member black American community living in the vicinity of Philadelphia as it went through its epidemic of the yellow fever in this year, and these people were free but were living in abject poverty. Absalom Jones and Richard Allen had a few years before formed in this community the 1st self-help group
to be organized by black Americans, and one of the principal white doctors dealing with this epidemic, Dr. Benjamin Rush, was an abolitionist. Are you beginning to get the picture? –What developed was that the
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Philadelphia blacks were being organized as a cheapo nursing service for sick whites, while in fact this nursing staff was itself dying in similar proportion as these whites who were being attended. Even black convicts were being released, from the Walnut Street prison, in order to assist at the emergency “contagion hospital” set up on Bush Hill for sick white people.1
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. Many people thrust their parents into the streets as soon as they complain of a headache.
The epidemic would die down in the early winter, as frost killed the female Culicidae Aëdes aegypti stowaways which had brought the virus up from the Caribbean with the race-war refugees. A count of fresh graves in cemeteries near Philadelphia reached a total of 4,041, which would seem to indicate that in our nation’s capital at least 5,000 had died out of a total population of about 45,000. Within four months the population had been “decimated” (a technical term meaning that fewer than nine out of ten remained living).
Ann Bonsall Say, wife of Dr. Benjamin Say of Philadelphia and mother of the child Thomas Say, died (although whether she died of the yellow fever or of some other cause I do not know).
On the following screen is the manner in which John F. Watson’s ANNALS OF PHILADELPHIA AND 2 PENNSYLVANIA would summarize the epidemic: The need for a place to examine, detain, and quarantine travelers by ship into the United States via Philadelphia was recognized almost immediately during and following this epidemic. Circumstances surrounding the epidemic –including the arrival of potential revolutionaries, malcontents, and shiploads of slaves from exploding San Domingue (Haiti)– caused a panic in the capital city to repel unwanted foreigners who might infect the nation with French infidelity, revolutionary ideas, or rampaging tropical diseases. While the exact cause of the yellow fever was unknown at the time, the devastating disease was associated with the ships arriving from the Caribbean in ports such as Charleston, South Carolina, Norfolk, Virginia, Baltimore, Maryland, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, etc. Debates in Philadelphia on how to treat those inflicted with the disease splintered whites and blacks, French and Americans, slaves and free blacks into warring parties. Some physicians in Philadelphia favored bleeding and purging; others prescribed passive treatments of rest, liquids, and cool sponges to reduce the fevers. Fears of the unknown was causing Americans to repel foreigners and potential foreign threats in much the same manner as we saw in the immediate wake of 9-11. A “lazaretto” was established near Philadelphia through the collaboration of the US federal government, the government of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the city government itself, to insure that dangerous, unwanted, or potentially infected immigrants or travelers to the United States could be halted, detained, or excluded from entry to nation through that port.
1. Afterward of course these black nurses would be accused not only of extorting exorbitant fees for their services to the white community during the white community’s emergency, but also of pilfering the property of the dead and dying. –Which only goes to show how difficult it can become, psychically, when one needs to feel gratitude toward one’s social inferiors! 2. Watson, John Fanning. WATSON’S ANNALS OF PHILADELPHIA AND PENNSYLVANIA, A COLLECTION OF MEMOIRS, ANECDOTES, AND INCIDENTS OF THE CITY AND ITS INHABITANTS AND OF THE EARLIEST SETTLEMENTS OF THE INLAND PART OF PENNSYLVANIA FROM THE DAYS OF THE FOUNDERS INTENDED TO PRESERVE THE RECOLLECTIONS OF OLDEN TIME, AND TO EXHIBIT SOCIETY IN ITS CHANGES OF MANNERS AND CUSTOMS, AND THE CITY AND COUNTRY IN THEIR LOCAL CHANGES AND IMPROVEMENTS. Written between 1830 and 1850, published 1857
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No history of Philadelphia would be complete, which should overlook the eventful period of 1793, when the fatal yellow fever made its ravages there. It is an event which should never be forgotten; because, whether we regard it as a natural or a spiritual scourge, (effected by the divine power) it is a calamity which may revisit us and which, therefore, should be duly considered, or we suffer it to lose its proper moral influence. The medical histories and official accounts of that disastrous period are in print before the public, and in general terms, give the statement of the rise, progress, and termination of the disease, and the lists of the weekly, monthly, and total deaths: but the ideas of the reader are too generalized to be properly affected with the measure of individual sufferings; therefore, the facts which I have preserved on that memorable occasion, are calculated to supply that defect, and to bring the whole home to people’s interests and bosoms. Let the reader think of a desolation which shut up nearly all the usual churches; their pastors generally fled, and their congregations scattered; the few that still assembled in small circles for religious exercises, not without just fears that their assembling might communicate the disease from one to the other. No light and careless hearers then appeared, and no flippant preaching to indulge itching ears: all, all was solemn and impressive. They then felt and thought they should not all meet again on a like occasion; death, judgment, and eternity then possessed the minds of all who so assembled. Look, then, in which way you would through the streets, and you saw the exposed coffins on chair-wheels, either in quick motion, or you saw the wheels drawn before houses to receive their pestilential charge. Then family, friends, or mourners scarcely ever accompanied them; and no coffins were adorned to please the eye; but coarse, stained wood of hasty fabric received them all. The graves were not dug singly, but pits which might receive many before entire filling up, were opened. In the streets you met no cheerful, heedless faces, but pensive downcast eyes and hurried steps, hastening to the necessary calls of the sick. Then the haunts of vice were shut up; drunkenness and revelling found no companions; tavern doors grew rusty on their hinges; the lewd or merry song was hushed; lewdness perished or was banished, and men generally called upon God. Men saluted each other as if doubting to be met again, and their conversation for the moment was about their several losses and sufferings. The facts of “moving incidents” in individual cases, prepared for the present article, have been necessarily excluded from lack of room, but may hereafter be consulted on pages 210 to 213 in my MS Annals in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
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September 11, Wednesday: The Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth wrote a memoir in German entitled SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE YELLOW FEVER IN PHILADELPHIA FOR THE REFLECTING CHRISTIAN which is now at the Lutheran Seminary in the Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia. Here is his notation for this day: “Visited the old Beck, but he was unconscious. Buried Mrs. Deis and later a child from Campt. Talked to two people at the funeral, Ritter and Karcker, about religion. At noon was asked to come to the Frontstr., visited also the sick girl of Schwaap’s. In the afternoon again to Krehre’s son. Buried the old Mrs. Kempf and Mrs. Dewis. Made a poem about the present hardship of the town. Late at night was asked to visit a man named Tryon who felt very humble [Verlegenheit].” YELLOW FEVER
September 16, Monday: Here is the Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth’s notation for this day per his SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE YELLOW FEVER IN PHILADELPHIA FOR THE REFLECTING CHRISTIAN: “I am afraid that today the number of burials will exceed yesterdays. Schmidt preached in the morning service, the church was very full. Visited Kraser’s son, then Henzmann’s wife, then Diderich’s son and a woman in Spiels and the corpse of the young Schubert. In the afternoon in Crostsum’s[?] Alley — to a Selber-Gut Peter Hartmann’s wife. Six or seven more corpses. A lot of work till late, came home very tired. At night again to the Zucker-Alley at 8th Str to visit a sick person. Met Dr. Duffield there.” PHILADELPHIA YELLOW FEVER
September 17, Tuesday: Here is the Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth’s notation for this day per his SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE YELLOW FEVER IN PHILADELPHIA FOR THE REFLECTING CHRISTIAN: “Weather changed, fresh wind from the north. Will hopefully change the hardship. Went to P. Schmidt — opened the windows in the church — went to see the sister of Wagner in the Moravian Alley, but she was already dead. Preached and prayed at Zion, crowded.” PHILADELPHIA YELLOW FEVER
September 18, Wednesday: President George Washington laid the cornerstone of the US Capitol.
Here is the Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth’s notation for this day per his SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE YELLOW FEVER IN PHILADELPHIA FOR THE REFLECTING CHRISTIAN: “Went to the widow Wegman whose son has been sick since yesterday. Went to Morgan’s, his wife is sick, but better. Buried Eisenbrey. Visited a sick person in the Front— between Wirestr. and Ardbuckle Row. Was asked to come to Roler’s house, but the sick person was already dead. Visited Kraft’s, the daughter is dying. Spent a lot of time with the old Herzmann, who also lay down and wanted to write down his will. Visited Stucker’s, he had a heart attack and is dying. Buried the young Weissmann and Katto. Preached about how important and blessed it is to live with Jesus. Met D. Rush who is feeling well and confident. Felt bad myself. Lord, your will may be done!” PHILADELPHIA YELLOW FEVER
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September 19, Thursday: Here is the Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth’s notation for this day per his SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE YELLOW FEVER IN PHILADELPHIA FOR THE REFLECTING CHRISTIAN: “Visited Mrs. Strubelin — Stacker’s — Krafft and daughter. Smelled the breath of death for the first time since all this hardship began, was scared.” PHILADELPHIA YELLOW FEVER
September 22, Sunday: Here is the Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth’s notation, presumably for this day, per his SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE YELLOW FEVER IN PHILADELPHIA FOR THE REFLECTING CHRISTIAN: “Schreyer and his wife dead — also Kroll. Buried Stucker. It was decided to have services again in both churches. Visited the child of Mr. Krebser who got the fever, also the oldest child and the apprentice. P. Schmidt’s servant got an attack, too. Baptized some children. Preached at Zion in the afternoon, blessed. Visited Mrs. Meineke. Visited Bock’s sister in Kensington. Visited Mrs. Richter in Frontstr. Mr. Lex spent a lot of time here. Barbara changed her mind, she does not want to go to Germantown. Schrager and his wife were buried today, also Flech — etc.” PHILADELPHIA YELLOW FEVER
September 23, Monday: Here is the Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth’s notation for this day per his SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE YELLOW FEVER IN PHILADELPHIA FOR THE REFLECTING CHRISTIAN: “Segitz was buried early this morning. He left the congregation £100. Visited a sick man and woman in Campt. Visited Samuel Becker who is going to die. Went to the sick Beck who is also close to his end. Visited Schlesmann, the other baker, who is also very sick. Talked to Christler who seems to be better. Prayed with Mrs. Meineke who said she was feeling better. Krebser’s children and apprentice are well again. Buried Kinzler — Kesler’s son and Denberger. Knaker’s son came and told me that his father has to be buried tonight.” YELLOW FEVER
September 28, Saturday: Here is the Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth’s notation, presumably for this day, per his SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE YELLOW FEVER IN PHILADELPHIA FOR THE REFLECTING CHRISTIAN: “Mrs. Gasner very sick. Prayed for her. Krafft better — Hawkins with the whole family very bad. Many good news from Bush Hill that sick people get better. YELLOW FEVER
September 29, Sunday: Here is the Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth’s notation for this day per his SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE YELLOW FEVER IN PHILADELPHIA FOR THE REFLECTING CHRISTIAN: “The sickness and death are all around us. Lord Jesus, help us. Do not leave us alone. You know what I am hoping for myself and my family. Visited the wife of the young Stockard and prayed with her. Preached in Zion. Had to sing myself because no schoolmaster was there. Baptized a child. Was asked to come to the old Forstberg who is dying. Buried Carl Sing who had still been sitting in front of his door last night. Went to Schleicher who is going to die this time. Went to Holtenius who is very weak. Talked and prayed with a couple in the Lombard Str. who are very sick. Baptized the child of Bock’s. Was asked to visit Morgan-Schmidt in the Walnutstr.” YELLOW FEVER
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October 11, Friday: Here is the Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth’s notation for this day per his SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE YELLOW FEVER IN PHILADELPHIA FOR THE REFLECTING CHRISTIAN: “Met Riese’s daughter. Visited Jacob and his English wife. Then to widow Knodel who was better. Visited Hazard’s English and German servant. Went to Mich. Keppele and again to G. Keppele. Talked to two Quaker and tried to convince them that this was a very blessed time for Philadelphia. One of them was moved and started to cry. D. Rodgers has also lost his wife. Was feeling very well, had taken some of — ‘Keinles Mixtur’ Our servant who had wanted to leave this morning because she was afraid of getting infected because I had so much to do with sick people decided to stay.” In the margin of the sheet, the notation: “21 corpses.”
October 12, Saturday: A newly reconstituted Republican authority in Lyon decreed that henceforth the city’s name would be “Ville-Affranchie” (Liberated Town). The homes of rich people were to be demolished.
Former Queen Marie Antoinette was interrogated before a revolutionary tribunal.
Here is the Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth’s notation for this day per his SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE YELLOW FEVER IN PHILADELPHIA FOR THE REFLECTING CHRISTIAN: “P. Schmidt, Fridrich and Gotfried were better, also Georg Keppel. Drove to Camptown — Mrs.Weiser was dead — the young Strauss better, also Schneider and Walter and his wife. Sturmfels still sick — Janus better, but his child dying — Michael Hay and his wife dying, also Stahlin. The young Anthony and Mrs.Stuckard dead. Walter in 4th Str. still very sick. Becker and his wife better. Ries better, his daughter very sick and son’s wife sick, too. Burkhard very sick — his wife almost well. Daum better, his wife dying. Schiller better — Mrs.Buss in Campt. very sick. Rain in the evening. Feeling not as well as yesterday, afraid that I will become sick, too.” In the margin of the sheet, the notation: “Buried 17 today. 130 were buried in our congregation during the last week.
October 13, Sunday: Here is the Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth’s notation for this day per his SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE YELLOW FEVER IN PHILADELPHIA FOR THE REFLECTING CHRISTIAN: “Strong Northwestwind during the whole night. Perhaps God wants to help this poor city and bring back it’s health by this wind. Went to P. Schmidt, he seems to be better. Keppeler’s servant is about to die. I am afraid the poor G. Keppele will cause a lot of problems for his family — he talked to me today for a much too long time about his contestations. Lord Jesus, help him! Preached to a large gathering about Jes. 26, 1. I showed that Philadelphia is a very blessed city — the Lord is among us and especially in our congregation. I proved this with examples of dead and still living people. Baptized a child. Announced that I could not be with the corpses, that the sick should be reported to me in the morning so that I could....” [next page missing, perhaps “visit them in the afternoon.”]
October 26, Saturday: Here is the Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth’s notation for this day per his SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE YELLOW FEVER IN PHILADELPHIA FOR THE REFLECTING CHRISTIAN: “Valentin Krieg a bit better. Talked with Burkhard, both he and his wife almost well. Wagener’s wife very bad. Hailer had again become sick, but better. Haass and his wife better, but still weak. Kerle and Wagener’s wife buried today. Emmerig’s son very sick.” In the margin of the sheet, the notation: “5 corpses.”
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October 27, Sunday: Empress Ekaterina II of Russia proclaimed six weeks of mourning for former Queen Marie Antoinette.
Here is the Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth’s notation for this day per his SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE YELLOW FEVER IN PHILADELPHIA FOR THE REFLECTING CHRISTIAN: “Eight buried yesterday at Fischer’s. One corpse today, Rieb. Visited Peter Gabels wife after church in Campt. and the widows. Muff better, daughter in law dying. Buried Rieb after the service. Very cold, but no rain.” In the margin of the sheet, the notation: “one corpse.”
October 28, Monday: Here is the Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth’s notation for this day per his SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE YELLOW FEVER IN PHILADELPHIA FOR THE REFLECTING CHRISTIAN: “Cold northwind. Buried the widow Pab — and Muff’s wife — in the afternoon Emmerig’s son. Visited the widow Dischong and her son, then Boshard’s wife and Hagener’s daughter.” In the margin of the sheet, the notation: “6 corpses.”
1794
Yellow Fever in New Haven, Connecticut: Summer weather was proving delightful and the world seemed to be returning to normal with deadly fevers in the far away tropics. Then doctors in New Haven, Connecticut, observed the sine qua non of yellow fever, a terrible quick death. On June 10 Isaac Gorham’s 27 year old wife Elizabeth complained of violent head, back and limb pains and nausea. On the 14th the pains stopped “and she was elated with the prospect of a speedy recovery.” That evening “she vomited matter resembling coffee- grounds.” She died the next day. A few days later a niece who had lived with her a week died with the same symptoms. On June 20, the merchant Elijah Austin and his clerk both died in New York City after having left New Haven a few days previous. “Sickness and death prevail in the town,” Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College, wrote in his diary. Three doctors, asked by the city’s selectmen to investigate, found that a sloop from Martinique “infected with the contagion of the yellow fever” had been near the Gorham house. A chest of clothes that belonged to one of the seamen who died of yellow fever had been opened by Austin in the presence of his clerk and Mrs. Gorham. For New Haven official the imperative to conceal the existence of any epidemic disease outweighed any other consideration. The city of 3,400 was Connecticut’s largest port, specializing in the South Sea trade. Its chief glory each year was the mid- September commencement day at Yale College during which the population of the town might swell by several thousand. The investigating doctors’ report of July 8 tried to put the recent deaths in perspective. Seventy-seven people had died in New Haven since January, 43 of them, mostly children, from scarlet fever, 18 from consumption and 16 “with erratic diseases.” The committee thought reports “respecting the mortality of this disease” had been “very much exaggerated.” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 17 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Still, the New Haven epidemic became notorious. A New York paper reported that Yellow Fever imported in a trunk from the West Indies killed several people in New Haven. New York and Philadelphia announced a quarantine on all ships and goods from New Haven. A merchant in New York with New Haven connections advised friends there not to protest. “The distress which the Philadelphians experienced last year is fresh in the memory of everyone, and a possibility of the fever being introduced here apologizes for almost any means to prevent it.” New Haven town officials kept quiet even as the death toll rose. There were at least 4 deaths a week from yellow fever beginning in August. Officials quietly designated a special hospital for those with the fever, hired nurses at a dollar a day, and solicited money to defray the expense. On August 20 the committee published a report noting that only 5 were sick with the fever, and that “regulations lately adopted, will prevent the progress of the fever.” Ezra Stiles left a franker assessment in his diary. Out of 20 patients, 16 to 18 had died. On the 26th there were three funerals and three or four taken sick. “Terror.... Scholars alarmed. At 2 P.M. they began to apply for leave to go home. I have dismissed 61 scholars out of 115 today. Numbers of gentlemen moving their families out of town.” Stiles’ diary provides the most candid source on the progress of the epidemic: August 27th, the sick in town today are ten. The town in general more healthy than usual in August. 29th only four in town today with Yellow Fever at 10 a.m. 30th this morning the sick better, all but one. Two vessels in from the West Indies. Both had the fever on board. One kept off in the channel. Streets on wharf being cleansed. Stores on wharf cleansing. September 1st, the sick better; two new ones taken yesterday, and one last night. 5th, 3 died last night; the doctors count eight patients down with Yellow Fever. Hitherto I believed that by care and vigilance of the authorities, it might be guarded and its progress checked, as we could hitherto, trace all the instances; but now they begin to be lost and bewildered. I begin to give up the possibility of preventing its spread, and to be discouraged and to wish my family out of town. Sent off my Eliza to farm. 9th, Dr. Dana’s statement of this disorder this day; deaths 29; recovering and convalescent, 22; sick and not yet arrived at crisis, 3. 12th, the sick getting along very comfortably today; seven sick of which one dangerous; four died the past week. 19th, six more taken with the disorder. 20th, the disorder spreads; about twelve or thirteen have it; some bad. 24th, the disorder spreading away from New Haven; twenty-six sick with Yellow Fever, of which four dangerous.
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25th, twenty-six sick. 27th, thirty-two sick. October 11th, ten this evening on the list, of which two dangerous. 15th, eight now sick with Yellow Fever; eight deaths from yellow fever since October 1st. 16th, there are but five sick with the fever, and all convalescent. The disorder greatly abated. 18th, the sick are recovering; no more taken. The committee are dismissing all the nurses, in hopes it may not break out again. There have sometimes been twenty nurses at a dollar a day. The expense incurred on the town by this sickness has amounted to 500 Pounds; about 160 patients, and between 60 and 70 deaths of this disorder. 21st, three or four still laboring with this disorder, of which two are critical and dangerous. November 8th, arrived home from a journey. The Yellow Fever abated and hopefully extinguished, as the last was 27th ultimo. None now sick; inhabitants are returning. Some More Primary Documents In 1795 in response to the national crisis being caused by Yellow Fever, the newspaper editor Noah Webster solicited reports from doctors and others in an effort to better understand the epidemics. A Yale graduate and native of Connecticut, Webster inspired two physicians, father and son, to respond: Two Letters Relative to the Yellow Fever, as it appeared in New- Haven, in the State of Connecticut, in the Year 1794 Letter First On the Origins, Symptoms, & c., of the Yellow Fever, in New Haven Dr. Monson, Jun. to the Publisher. Sir, In giving a history of the origin of the Yellow Fever, or Pestilential Fever, as it appeared in this City, in the year 179, it will be necessary to premise some account of those diseases which prevailed here, immediately before; that the Public may be enabled to judge whether there is any analogy between them and the Fever in question. Sometime in 1792 and 1793, the Scarlet Fever, or Ulcerous Sore Throat, made its appearance in Litchfield, Water-town, and the towns in the vicinity of New-Haven; and raged with great mortality. In September and October 1793, many of the inhabitants of this town were affected with a slight Influenza, stinking pains in their jaws and limbs, soreness in muscles of the neck, with a light Fever. - In November and December following, several children were affected with the Ulcerous Sore Throat. The symptoms were no alarming; and in every instance it terminated favorably. - In January 1794, the disease assumed a more
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malignant appearance. In February, March, April, May, June and July, it was highly putrid; and many fell victims to its malignity. On the 10th of June 1794, the Pestilential, or Yellow Fever, appeared here. - Doctor Hotchkiss visited Isaac Gorham’s wife, on the Long-Wharf. She complained of a violent pain in her head, back and limbs; her eyes were dull, and slightly inflamed; she had nausea at stomach, was obstinately costive, with a moderate degree of Fever. No marks of inflammation were discoverable, by inspection in the throat. The distressful symptoms, above-mentioned, continued till the fourteenth; when her pains and distress suddenly subsided; and she was elated with the prospect of a speedy recovery. In the evening, she vomited matter resembling coffee-grounds; and died on the 15th. The Physician, who attended her, was ignorant of her complaint until he saw what she vomited. He then declared her disease to be the Yellow Fever. On the 15th of June, I visited Elias Gorhams daughter, a child of 8 years of age, in Chapel Street, three quarters of a mile from Isaac Gorham’s house. She had been sick three days; her countenance was flushed with a deep red color; her eyes were dull, and highly inflamed; she had violent pain in her head, back, and limbs; nausea, and frequent vomiting; obstinate costiveness, a quick, full, hard, throbbing pulse; her skin was hot and dry; and her tongue covered with a thick white fur. On the 16th, her pain and distress suddenly abated; in a few hours, she vomited up matter resembling coffee-grounds; and died the next day. I inspected her throat, during her illness, and could discover no marks of inflammation. I was surprised at the singular appearance of the disease, and hearing of the death of Mrs. Gorham (Isaac Gorham’s wife) inquired of the mother if her daughter had been on the wharf. She informed me that the child had lived with her aunt (Isaac Gorham’s wife) nearly a week. The 23d of June, I visited the child’s mother. She complained of violent pain in her head, back, and limbs; nausea; frequent vomiting; obstinate costiveness; with considerable degree of fever. These symptoms continued five or six days; then gradually abated; and soon after she recovered her usual health. On the 20th of June, Mr. Elijah Austin died in New-York; and his clerk, Henry Hubbard, died in Derby. They complained within three or four hours of each other; and Mr. Hubbard vomited matter resembling coffee-grounds. The inhabitants of this town were alarmed at these sudden deaths, and requested the Select-Men to make diligent inquiry into the origin of this disease. On examination, it appeared - That, in the beginning of June, Capt. Truman arrived from Martinico, in a sloop that was infected with the contagion of the Yellow
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Fever; that this vessel lay at the wharf, within a few rods of Isaac Gorham’s house; that she had on board a chest of clothes, which had belonged to a mariner, who had died of the Yellow Fever, in Martinico; and that his chest was carried into Mr. Austin’s store, and opened in the presence of Capt. Truman, Mr. Austin, Henry Hubbard and Polly Gorham; the three last mentioned of whom, died, in a short time after their exposure to the contents of the chest. Hence it is highly probable that Mrs. Gorham caught the disease from the infected sloop, or clothing. Mr. Austin’s store stands within three or four rods of Isaac Gorham’s house; and no person in town was known to have the Yellow Fever previous to Capt. Truman’s arrival. June 26th, Isaac Gorham lost an infant child with the Yellow Fever; and soon after his son and daughter were affected with it: the former died. Solomon Mudge died on the 30th, Jacob Thomson’s negro woman, on the 1st of July; Archibald M’Neil on the 9th; Polly Brown on the 3d of August; John Storer, jun. and John Hide on the 8th: and widow Thomson on the 10th. - Jacob Thomson’s negro woman, Solomon Mudge, John Storer, jun. and John Hide, had visited Mr. Gorham’s house; and Archibald M’Neil nursed Solomon Mudge. Elias Gill died on the 12th of August; and Samuel Griswold’s wife, on the 7th: the former visited Mr. Gorham’s house; the latter nursed in his family. There were a number of persons who caught the disease at Mr. Gorham’s house and recovered. Mrs. Thomson, on the first day of her illness, was moved half a mile from Mr. Gorham’s, into George Street. Luther Fitch caught the disease from Mrs. Thomson, and communicated it to his servant maid. Both recovered - Mr. Fitch lives in College-street, nearly three quarters of a mile distant from Mr. Gorham’s house. I could trace the disease throughout the town. No person had the Yellow Fever, unless in consequence of attending the sick, or of being exposed by nurses, infected houses, clothing, or furniture. I have inquired of several aged persons in this town, relative to the Yellow Fever, whether they knew of its having ever been here, previous to June 1794, and there is but a single instance; the facts relating to which are these: - in the year 1743, a transient person, by the name of Nevins, who came from the West Indies, lodged in the house of Nathaniel Brown, an inn-keeper in this city. The man was taken very sick, in the night; and died shortly afterwards; and his body was very yellow after death. - Mr. Brown’s wife sickened in a short time, and died, of the same complaint; which was, at that time, supposed to be the Yellow Fever. I am credibly informed that several persons, at Mill- River in Fairfield county, and also at New- London, died with the Yellow Fever, in August and September 1795. It was propagated there by infected persons from New York.
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Capt. John Smith died in this town, the 20th of August 1795. He caught the disease in New York and communicated it to one of his negro servants. ******** The following is an account of the number who died with the Yellow Fever in New-Haven in the different months of the year 1794. June 6 July 3 August 16 September 26 October 12 November 1 Total 64 Of this number, forty-eight vomited matter resembling coffee- grounds, or port wine. There were about a hundred and sixty persons who had the Yellow Fever. Three persons recovered who vomited matter like coffee-grounds; but none recovered, that I remember, who vomited matter resembling port wine. Some vomited a viscid, tough mucus, similar to the white of eggs; others, natter like chocolate; which were as fatal as the black vomit. The Yellow-Fever was attended with specific contagion in every instance, and proved equally mortal in every part of the town, in proportion to the number that were sick. No age, nor sex, were exempted from it’s ravages. All descriptions of people were alike susceptible of receiving the contagion. In the month of September, when the Yellow Fever raged with the greatest violence, the inhabitants, in general, were almost entirely free from every other complaint. It was remarked by the citizens, that they never knew it so healthy, at that season of the year - excepting the Yellow Fever. ********** The following is an accurate register of the number who died of Scarlet-Fever, or Ulcerous Sore Throat, in 1794. February 3 March 5 April 5 May 10 June 15 July 7 August 3 September 2 October 2 Total 52
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It was computed that 750 persons had the Scarlet Fever. — This disease appeared in almost every family in town, indiscriminately; and was evidently, an Epidemical disease, which originated in the constitution of the air, — while the Yellow Fever was propagated only by contagion.
Yellow Fever in Baltimore, Maryland: On August 7 the president issued a proclamation giving the tax rebels until September 1 to disperse their armed bands and obey the law. The crisis couldn’t keep news of fevers out of the papers. There was an alarm in Baltimore that “the West India Yellow Fever did prevail very generally at Fell’s Point, and was accompanied with its usual mortality.” An investigating committee quickly corrected the rumor. Drunkenness and the heat, not an epidemic fever, caused the deaths, which were not excessive for that time of year. On September 17, a letter in Brown’s new Philadelphia Gazette, sent from Baltimore six days earlier, reported “that we have yellow fever among us is denied now only by ignorance.” The writer ridiculed doctors who gave the dangerous fever other names and reported that doctors who treated the fever with Rush’s methods were falsely accused of killing patients: “When the enlightened Dr. Coulter bled freely at the Point... it was whispered that he bled his patients to death. He has now only one regret, and that is that he did not bleed more freely in some cases.” Given the endorsement of bleeding, it was easy to surmise that Rush or one of his apprentices gave the letters to the newspaper. The writer was Thomas Drysdale, a young doctor who had studied with Rush. Baltimore was one of the fastest growing cities in the country with a population of around 15,000. The area Drysdale referred to was Fell’s Point occupied almost exclusively by the sailors, laborers, tradesmen, their families and attendant low life that flocked to a booming port. When people died there, it was easy to blame rum. The judicial, governmental, ceremonial, social and commercial center of the city was across a quarter mile of marsh and sand. It was as if Philadelphia’s Water Street had been pushed away from everything else. Drysdale continued to report on the plight of the city and the virtues of Rush’s remedies. On September 20, he extolled “the evacuating system in yellow fever.” “I disregard this fever as much as any disease I ever contended. A very few visits, and a good nurse, ensure recovery.” He still attacked myopic colleagues for misidentifying the disease, and celebrated the wisdom of the people: “Those ignorant fellows, who deny our having the disease, are laughing stocks, when called to a bad case. They, while denying the real nature of the disease, and its contagion, stand aloof, and stuff their mouths and nostrils with their handkerchiefs. The people are more wise, and of one opinion. They never saw such a disease, and therefore unanimously admit, it is the Yellow Fever.” Up to 23 people had been dying a day, 30 in the last 24 hours. Dr. Coulter was seeing 150 patients a day. “The mortality in proportion to the number
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on the Point, exceeds the melancholy multitude which died in Philadelphia.” People were dying within 12 hours of getting the fever. At the Point streets were deserted and “every person who remains looks as if a Thunderbolt had bursted over his head.” Opinion makers in Philadelphia like editor Mathew Carey, who had been treated so rudely by Baltimore authorities the year before, were prompted to engineer revenge against the rival port. However as long as rumors abounded about Yellow Fever in Philadelphia action against Baltimore was not advisable. Baltimore newspapers while not mentioning sickness in their city did publish letters from Philadelphia describing yellow fever there. Drysdale was probably the source for one letter because it came from some one close to Rush who described how that worthy was being persecuted for reporting yellow fever cases. “They circulate with great assiduity that he is mad, and have even proposed to drum him out of the city for ‘disturbing the quiet of the inhabitants’ - in other words - lessening the sale of fall goods.” An ad hoc committee of citizens met in Philadelphia to decide if goods and people from Baltimore should be quarantined. The city’s health committee first gave Philadelphia a clean bill of health. In his notebook Rush labeled that report “false and scandalous,” but he did not attend the general meeting of citizens on October 2 at which the health committee’s all clear allowed a call for measures against Baltimore. The meeting was sparsely attended, but a full report was in Brown’s Gazette. The only doctor to speak was Currie, who, a reporter noted, “spoke so extremely low, that it was with difficulty he could be heard.” His diffidence may have arisen because he was taking an unpopular position. He doubted that there was a contagious disease in Baltimore, and thought Yellow Fever was in Philadelphia. Carey insisted that Baltimoreans were the best judge of the state of their city and they were fleeing. William Sansom said he had seen a sick man all yellow in a carriage from Baltimore and memories of ’93 were too painful to risk infection from that city. John Connelly quoted an alarming letter from Baltimore. One of the Hollingsworth brothers wrote: “Our town is in great confusion. Every one are removing to the country who can procure a place to go. Benjamin May [a prominent merchant] is dead and this day buried; yesterday the deaths were about 20.... Every street in town has now more or less the disease in it.... All business is stagnated and the bank demands are very oppressive.” Miers Fisher, who was getting reassuring reports from his son Thomas, urged moderation, only one person had died on the young man’s street. The upshot was the formation of committee to ask the stage companies to stop bringing passengers from Baltimore. No official quarantine could be instituted because the governor had gone west to be closer to the military action against tax rebels. For the remainder of the month Baltimore and Philadelphia traded charges. The former insisting Philadelphia was cutting off intercourse to hide its own epidemic. Philadelphia contrasted its responsible actions - any passenger stopped would be comfortably accommodated while waiting out a quarantine - with Baltimore’s callous treatment of Philadelphians in 1793. On
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October 2, a cold front made the dispute moot. The Baltimore health committee attacked “the false and exaggerated accounts” of sickness in the city, which it blamed on “a young man desirous of establishing his own reputation at the expense of truth and of the town in which he lives.” Only 344 people had died in August and September, many children with small pox, and with “the present happy change of weather... the health of the town will be speedily re-established.” Soon Drysdale had to agree with that. His last death was on October 6. Then he devoted himself to answering Rush’s request for a history of the epidemic. On December 4 he sent off a bound hand written document of over three hundred pages divided into 12 letters discussing various aspects of the epidemic with 23 case histories appended. It was loosely modeled on Rush’s memoir of the 1793 epidemic. Drysdale described how the shifting winds over putrefying vegetable matter under wharves and houses spread the fever, how the fever proved contagious, and how calomel and bleeding cured most patients. He displayed a wide reading of ancient authors, adding more authority to Rush’s epidemiology and therapeutics. In retrospect, the most interesting observations Drysdale made were in two case histories where he noted “a great number of small red spots” which he “would have called... pestechia [evidence of putrid fever] had not the mosquitoes been so numerous, from whose bites perhaps they arose.” Rush did not pass the manuscript on to a publisher until 1804, after Drysdale died. Rush never explained why he waited that long. The whole work was couched as a personal letter to him with frequent attestations to his genius, and it went over much of the same ground Rush had. But Rush was working on his own book. Bob Arnebeck Primary Document Account of the Yellow Fever in Baltimore, in 1794, by Dr. Drysdale Letter I. To Benjamin Rush, M.D. Dear Sir, You have requested a history of the yellow remitting fever, as it lately appeared in Baltimore; and I have, perhaps inconsiderately, promised to gratify your wish. The difficulties, which necessarily accompany such a task, increase in number, as I travel in imagination through the region before me “...Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise:” and when I contrast them with the powers of my youth, I am almost disuaded from the attempt. But I now enter on the undertaking with these pleasing reflection, that you will indulge the deficiency of execution, where the critic would condemn: for I am convinced with Dr. Moore, that “those, who have the greatest knowledge in their possession, are best acquainted with its uncertainty, and most indulgent to the mistakes and errors of others.”
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An account of the weather, which preceded the appearance, and accompanied the progress of this awful disease to the close of its career, will be given more properly in another place. But it may not be unnecessary to mention here, the principal diseases which characterized the summer and autumn. In the town, the cholera made its appearance among children as early as the months of April and May; but it is very remarkable, that this disease was unknown through the summer upon Fell’s Point. On the lower part of Baltimore, the month of May was unusually healthy, a catarrh only affecting many children. In the beginning of June, intermittents and dysenteries became more general, and as the season advanced, remittents also made their appearance. These three diseases, especially the first and last, ranged through every part of the country, and infested even the highest ground. But the most remarkable disease was the natural small- pox. It appeared very early in the summer and soon became epidemic. It advanced with the year, and made such devestation among its unfortunate victims, that Baltimore, perhaps, never before experienced so severe a scourge from this disease. Even they, who were inoculated in the spring, required peculiar attention; for it was so unusually insidious, that many unexpectedly suffered from it malignity. The first case of Yellow Fever, that I saw, was on the 7th of August. The patient was in the fourth day of the disease, and had been harassed several hours with the vomiting of that dark fluid, so greatly resembling strong coffee muddy with its grounds. His eyes had been very red, but were now, together with his skin, yellow: the latter was dry and cool; his pulse was slow and full. He was either oppressed with stupor - or deranged with a mild delirium. In a few hours he was dead. I could not pause a moment in believing his disease to be the yellow fever. I mentioned freely what I had seen, and expressed my apprehensions that this case might prove the prelude of a scene of calamity. The Point was now becoming considerably sickly, and many deaths occurred there suddenly, or after a very short indisposition. The several deaths that had occurred, together with the report, that the yellow fever had made its appearance, excited alarming apprehensions in the minds of the people. An inquiry was consequently made, by three of the most respectable physicians, into the state of the health of Baltimore. On the fifteenth of August they reported that, “Conformably to a request made by the grand jury, we yesterday proceeded to inquire into the grounds of a report, which for some days past has created serious alarms among the inhabitants of this town, viz. that the West India yellow fever did prevail very generally at Fell’s Point, and was accompanied with its usual
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mortality; that there are no grounds for believing that the yellow fever is yet among us. “After a careful examination of several persons, confined with fevers, and the most minute inquiry respecting those cases, which have lately proved mortal, we are unanimous in the following conclusions: - That the prevailing fever of that place is the common epidemic of this season, which annually visits our southern and middle states, viz. the bilious remitting fever; that the late mortality at that place, which has been greatly exaggerated by report, has not been owing to any one class of diseases in particular; that during our late very hot weather, most of the instances of sudden death arose from accidental causes. Many of the laborious class of the people were destroyed by the extreme heat of the sun, while employed in their useful labors. Intemperance was the cause of death to some, whilst indiscretions of different kinds proved destructive to others. “On the whole we are of opinion, that the mortality of this season has not exceeded that of many former ones, which passed unnoticed, & c. & c. Signed by Doctors George Brown, John Coulter, Lyde Goodwin.” Every funeral recalled to the minds of the Baltimoreans the late calamitous situation of Philadelphia. With the hearse and the grave they invariably associated the idea of the Yellow Fever, which had destroyed so many thousand citizens of a rival city. It is therefore not wonderful, that an alarm should have been excited, disproportionate to the mortality, that had yet occurred. The agreeable assurances they had just received, (and I am confident, that the physicians who gave them, had not met in their search a single case of yellow fever,) calmed the apprehensions of their minds. It is indeed to be deeply lamented, that any subsequent misfortune should have broken this tranquil situation of the town. On the fourteenth of August, Master McC-----, (who lived on Bowley’s wharf, in the same store with the gentleman who died on the seventh,) became diseased. He recovered from his fever; but on the nineteenth, a yellowness was very observable over his body, and soon became as intense as in jaundice. On the morning of the twentieth of August, Mr. M----n called on me for advice. On the first evening of his disease, I suspected the real nature of his fever, and did not hesitate to mention my apprehensions. I attended this gentleman in company with Dr. George Brown, my former preceptor in medicine; - a person, who truly combines all the merits of a professional character, with all the endearing and respected virtues of a gentleman. Mr. M-----e was attacked on the morning of the twenty-second; Mr. A------on the evening of the same day; and Mr. A------n on the following morning. These four gentlemen were engaged in commercial business on the same part of Bowley’s wharf. Some other persons living at the same place were also diseased at this time, but they did not fall under my observation.
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The peculiar symptoms, attending the fever of Mr. M----n, from its commencement to its fatal close, called from Dr. Brown an unequivocal declaration of its nature. His apprehensions were increased by the occurence of other cases at the same time and at the same place. The declaration I had made near three weeks before, was now seconded by an authority of the most indisputable nature. A town meeting was in consequence summoned, which terminated in the nomination of a committee of health. Their chairman, Gustavus Scott, Esq., was a gentleman of the highest honour and integrity; and it is therefore to be regretted, that his necessary avocations from the town, soon took him away from the regulation of their conduct through the scenes that followed. Fell’s Point was now becoming very unhealthy, and many cases of disease had terminated there speedily in death. On the thirty- first of August, I visited with Dr. Allendre, Mr. J. R. in the seventh day of his disease. He had now a constant hiccup, and a copious vomiting of the coffee grounds; his eyes were very yellow, his skin cool; his pulse full but so irregular, as to beat sometimes three pulsations in one-sixth of a minute; sometimes fifteen in the same period of time. He died the next morning. On the same part of Baltimore, I attended with Dr. Brown, Mr. Thomas L---- who was taken ill on the twenty-sixth of August; his apprentice boy on the twenty-seventh; and his maid servant on the thirty-first. Mr. C----’s son Thomas was attacked on the twenty-eighth; himself and his son Robert on the following day. A boy of captain F----’s was attacked on the twenty-seventh. In the town, three persons, who had contracted their fever on the Point, came under my observation on the twenty-ninth and thirtieth of August. All these cases, except one, terminated favourably. While this scene of disease was extending on the Point, the town became unusually healthy. Some took advantage of this circumstance, to oppose the assertion that a Yellow Fever had appeared among us, and to ridicule the authors of such a declaration. But the disease soon extended itself so widely, that incredulity ceased, and even the tongue of calumny itself was almost silent. About the sixth of September, the healthy tranquility of the town of Baltimore was again ruffled by the return of remitting fevers, which, together with the intermittents of this season, were almost universally accompanied with catarrhal symptoms. The tenth of the month will be long remembered by the inhabitants of Baltimore, as the day which deprived them of Mr. Stephen Wilson. He died of a bilious colic. His unshaken patriotism, as a citizen; the rectitude of his conduct, as a great commercial character; the liberality of his soul, as a humane and virtuous christian; the dignified simplicity of his manners, as a man; and the sincerity of his heart, as an inestimable friend, have left on every heart an impression, which can wear away only with life itself. The Yellow Fever continued to increase on the Point in extent and malignity. Doctors Allendre and Richard Griffith, and Degraffenreidt were at the same time in imminent danger of falling victim to it. Dr. Dorling had lately died in town, and
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Dr. ---- Griffith, sen. on the Point, was carried off after thirty hours indisposition. The reverend Mr. Buston, of the Roman catholic church, who had been much engaged on the Point in administering the last offices to the dying, was now dangerously ill. So great was the number of the sick about the twenty-fifth, that Doctor Coulter visited and prescribed for more than a hundred and twenty persons daily. Before the close of September, a panic spread through the town, and drove a great number of families to seek refuge in the country. As I rode on the morning of the thirtieth, through the Point, I was struck with the melancholy change induced by a very few days. The streets were no longer crowded, and noisy with business or festivity. The eye would scarcely meet a dozen persons in its longest street. In the rooms of the sick, I more particularly observed the stillness of the streets. But a little time before, even when the reduced violence of disease would have permitted them to doze, every slumber was broken or banished by the noise without. The whole day resembled in silence the hours of night. A happy change of weather at this time, checked the rapid progress of the fever, and rescued the town from sharing the general misfortune of the Point. The disease declined; and by the middle of October, the health-committee closed the accounts of the dead. The citizens returned to their homes and business; and in very short time, a person passing through the Point itself, would be reminded of its late situation only by observing in some alleys the bodies of a number of dead cats.
November 4: The yellow fever in New-York: We congratulate the Public on the disappearance of the contagion which has lately been so fatal to many of our Citizens; and tho’ we feel painful in reciting the loss of so many valuable Characters, yet to gratify the Public, who expect something of the kind, we here present them with the Names, & c. of those who have fallen victims to the Disease: They have been chiefly collected from Lists kept by private persons, and no doubt but they are very accurate. ______
The following is the Address, from the COMMITTEE of HEALTH, dated the 4th Nov. Fellow Citizens, But three persons have died on the last four days in this City, and but three at Bellevue since the 27th of October, of fever in any degree resembling our late Epidemic. The alarming situation in which this city has lately been, is calculated to excite the most serious reflections - to inspire feelings of veneration for that all controuling Power who, in the midst of such judgment, remembers mercy! - We trust that it has been under a sentiment of grateful dependance on him, that we have been encouraged to fulfil the duties you had entrusted: And we trust that while congratulations are repeated upon returning seasons of health, all hearts may be disposed to
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improve, to moral and virtuous purposes, both the threatening and felicitating dispensations of Heaven. Your Committee, at his period, chearfully recognize those principles of undeviating veracity, which during the increasing terror of their fellow- citizens, directed their daily reports respecting the progress of disease, -- It is with great satisfaction that they have found it evinced by their experience, that such exact details as they made to the public, instead of increasing those terrors, have tended in a great measure to subdue them: and the accomplishment of this is of immense importance to public happiness and convenience; fear mitigates its objects. During the existence of a calamity of this kind, circumstances will be ever exaggerated, by the timidity and credulity of individuals. It is to be lamented, however, that falsehoods have been propogated from the basest, meanest, and most despicable motives -- by some as an apology for their panic apprehensions -- by others, form the sensibilities of self-interest, and to gratify a sordid lust of gain,--- Lies have been propogated for the sake of the wonderful, and the excitement of surprise, by persons ungenerously forgetful of the extensive mischiefs naturally originating from this source - Despair - desertion - poverty - famine and death! Perhaps an ill-judged tenderness for their reputation has prevented the publication of the names of some offenders. Had the falsehoods, repeated with great confidence in the country had any proper foundation, our city would long since have been nearly desolated. We turn with pleasure to the recollection of circumstances more creditable to humanity and to acknowledge the liberality of those of our fellow citizens who have contributed to alleviate the distresses of the sick and suffering poor. The generous interference of sympathy from Philadelphia, and some neighbouring villages, demand our lasting gratitude: Such instances of mutual good-will and beneficence remain grateful memorials of the fraternity of a free and virtuous people. From these resources 8837 dollars have been received; and your Committee feel a responsibility in the faithful and just distribution. Its proper objects being numerous, and often probably not within the sphere of their individual knowledge, each of the members of the committee is associated with two respectable citizens, in seeking out the sick and relieving those to whom their charity is directed. Circumstances have not been wanting to shew the happy influence of temperance, cleanliness, and cold upon the late Epidemic. But while we rejoice that benevolent nature has given power to these agents to set bounds on its ravages, let us recollect that they are assiduously to be employed. We feel it incumbent on us to remind our fellow citizens of this truth, particularly those who are returning from the country. Houses which have contained the sick should be carefully ventilate; and things that have been employed by them, that cannot conveniently be cleansed by water, should be subjected freely to the action of cold. It is not impossible that neglect in these particulars may occasion a few solitary instances of this disease, until we have experienced intense frost. For though we flatter ourselves it
30 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE YELLOW FEVER BLACK VOMIT
is extinguished as an Epidemic, and our streets free from all infection, we have before us the experience of other places to impress the necessity of such precautions. Among the arrangement made by the Committee to prevent the spread of infectious disease, they consider early interments, and the use of the hearse, as one of the most important. Satisfactry of proofs of its utility might be detailed. It is to be wished that the good sense of the community might be exerted to conquer any prejudices which may remain in opposition to a practice of burial so much more convenient than the common mode, and so much more safe. The resent state of Bellevue Hospital is pleasing, not only from it we anticipate the speedy extinction of all diseases therein, but from the happy and comfortable situation of the sick, and from the satisfaction expressed by them, with respect to their medical attendance. But three new patients have been received during the last ten days. There are now 13 sick in the hospital, 12 of whom are considered out of all danger. Since its first establishment eighty-nine persons have been discharged cured; the deaths have been published with our daily reports. It is with great satisfaction that we remark, that, although some of the people who have been employed in attending this hospital have been slightly affected with the Epidemic, no one has died. Much to the injury of the unfortunate persons who have been sent to his place, its circumstances have been sometimes grossly misrepresented. The sick have, in consequence, in numerous instances, sought this Asylum with hearts aching with anxiety and despair. A senior consulting physician, was early appointed to visit it occasionally form this city. From its first establishment, one, and since the 24th of September, two physicians have constantly resided within its walls. A new building has been erected during the sickness, and no expense has been spared to render the sick commodious and happy. A committee from this board have made frequent visits and examination of its circumstances, and, from time to time, have witnessed with pleasure its improving state. A more vigilant, humane, or attentive man, was never appointed Purveyor to an Hospital, than our late worthy Member, Mr. Frederick Stymets, whose death reminds us of the loss of our other friend and associate, Dr. Malachia Treat, who, there is reason to suspect, was also of victim to the discharge of faithful duty. The public will join with us in deploring the loss of such worthy and respectable members of society. Before we dismiss the subject of the Hospital, it is but just that we acknowledge our sense of the merit of Dr. Alexander Anderson, and Dr. McFarlin, resident physicians at Bellevue (The former of these gentlemen engaged with zeal and virtue, at an early period, and under discouraging circumstance in their arduous duty.) Both for their persevering attention, humanity, and fidelity to the sick, they have deserved well of their country. The Committee being employed in arranging expenditures, and in the settlement of accounts, request that all persons having demands upon them, present the same to Alderman Furman, No. 100,
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 31 HDT WHAT? INDEX
BLACK VOMIT THE YELLOW FEVER
Broadway, on or before the 20th inst. Signed by JOHN BROOME, Chairman, And the rest of the Committee ______
List of the Names of the persons who have died in New-York, of the yellow fever, from the 29th of July, to the beginning of November, 1795. • Anderson, Mr. • Abernathy, William • Adamson, George •Adams, Mary • Ashton, George, Dover-Street • Adams, John, Water-Street • Adamson, Mrs., wife of John, Water-Street • Arcularius, Henry, Baker, Skinner-Street • A woman at Adamson’s, Water-Street • Adams, Mrs., wife of Isaac, Catherine-Street • Abeel, Mrs., Cherry-Street • Albertson, ------, • Abeel, Dr. David G. Physician • Astor, David • Armour, William • Beekman, William, Ship-yards, aged 70. • Bowman, Samuel, Sailor, Pine-Street. • Beekman, William, Dock-builder, Oliver-Street • Brigs, Sarah • Buckay, Mrs. • Buckley, Biddy, wife of Michael, Water-Street • Byrne, Nicholas, Water-Street • Burnett, Peter • Britton, John, Taylor, Cherry-Street • Bennett, Susan • Banner, James • Bowne, Elias • Bradish, Thomas •Braine, John H. • Brodie, William, Notary Public, Pearl-Street • Bolin, Noah A. • Berthau, Constant • Bruster, Mrs. • Bucker, Mrs. • Bartram, Euric • Backwoes, Jonathan • Boss, Mr. Taylor, Water-Street • Buckley’s, Mrs., little girl, Water-Street • Brower, Abraham, Printer, Liberty-Street • Berrian, Daniel, Ship-Carpenter, Water-Street • Baptist, Mrs. Wife of John, Water-Street • Breen, Hugh, Tobacconist, New-Slip • Bankson, Benjamin, Clerk in the Bank, died in Philadelphia
32 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE YELLOW FEVER BLACK VOMIT
• Boston, Mr. Taylor, Water-Street • Bastroom, Errick, Swedish Sailor •Baird, John • Baldwin, Daniel, Cartman, Catherine-Street • Burtine, Samuel, from Brooklyn • Barns, Mary, Servant-Maid, Water-Street • Browne, John, Bellows-Maker, Cheapside • Bull, Eleonor, Shop-Keeper, Cherry-Street • Barnes Robert, Grocer, Catherine-Street • Bragg, John, Merchant, Water-Street • Bleecker, John, Broker & Auctioneer, Cherry-Street • Bryson, Roibert, Tallow-Chandler, Ferry-Street • Baines. Wright, Silk-Dyer, Pearl-Street • Burlington, Breckford • Boyd, Julia • Bradish, Mrs. Water-Street • Baker, Jeremiah, Grocer, Front-Street • Bligh, Rev. Mr. Pearl-Street • Brooks, Dr. David, Catherine-Street • Bowne, Elias, Marshal, Roosevelt-Street • Boyle, Patrick • Buffay, Joseph • Baines, Joshua, Silk-Dyer, Pearl-Street • Billings, Noyes, Clerk, Pine-Street • Bragg, John • Bains, Bughtman • Buchannan, John, Grocer, Cherry-Street • Buchannan, Mrs., wife of John, Cherry-Street • Barnes, Robert • Burling, Mr. • Barnaby, John, Sailor, Cherry-Street • Bennett, Cornelius, Cartman, Harman-Street • Burner, Capt. Philip •Browne, Mr. • Brunace, Anthony •Blake, Mary •Boyle, Mary • Blake, Mrs. •Brower, Samuel • Brush, Rev. Jacob, of the Methodist Church • Cregier, Mrs. Nassau-Street • Compton, Matthias • Cook, Sarah • Carmichael, James, Front-Street • Chapman, Capt. Daniel, from Connecticut • Christie, John, Tavern-Keeper, Water-Street • Campbell, Donald, from Head of the Delaware • Cannon, Daniel • Chew, Thomas • Cock, James, Merchant, Ship-Yards
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 33 HDT WHAT? INDEX
BLACK VOMIT THE YELLOW FEVER
• Cook, -----, George Street • Clarke, ------, • Courtney, George, Plaister of Paris Manufacturer, Cherry-Street • Cannon, William • Cook, Catherine • Cevrie, Janus • Connor, Mrs. • Cock, Epraim • Christie, James • Church, William, Taylor, Water-Street • Clancey, James, Barber, Pecks-Slip • Cuff, a Negro • Coffee, Mr. • Clancy, William • Cadel, Mary • Cottle, Joseph • Child of widow Crawford’s • Casey, Thomas • Chevalier, Mr. Front-Street • Clinton, Eleonor, Washer-woman, Crane-Wharf • Compton, Matthew, Labourer, Cherry-Street • Carter, Betsey, Servant-maid, Water-Street • Cunningham, Patrick, Cherry-Street •Carrol, Mary • Commandinger, John, Shoemaker, Pearl-Street • Craven, John, Gauger, Church-Street • Coles, Mrs. Pecks-Slip • Crosson, Miss, Cherry-Street • Coles, ----, a young Lad • Cady, Samuel, Silver-Smith, Fly-Market • Camp, John, Merchant, William-Street • Conkling, Mrs. Cherry-Street • Christie, Mrs. Water-Street • Conray, Mrs. Wife of Peter, Roosevelt-Street • Carman, Benjamin, Hatter, Water-Street • Carsenbury, Michael, Catherine-Street • Copping, Francis • Conckling, Widow • Cunningham, James, Ferry-Street • Corrie, Mrs. Cooper, Cherry-Street • Casey, Fanny • Casey, Widow • Casey, Rosie • ------, a man at Casey’s Tavern, Water-Street • ------, a young woman at Tavern, Water-Street • Cavin, Mrs. Pearl-Street • Cudder, Son of Stephen • Crawford, Mary • Campbell, Mrs. • Commadinger, Andrew, Printer, Pearl-Street
34 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE YELLOW FEVER BLACK VOMIT
• Clancey, Thomas, Nailer, James-Street • Clinch, John •Charne, John • Carpenter, James • Carpenter, John, Boarding-House, Fletcher-Street • Crawford, Susannah • ----, ------, Commandinger’s Apprentice • -----, ------Mrs. Campbell’s Sister • Campbell, James •Colin, Mary • Clarey, Mrs. Cherry-Street • Connoly, John • Chevalier, Mr. French Teacher, Cliff-Street • Delaval, Mr. • Dalton, James, Labourer, Cherry-Street • Day, James, Cooper, Water-Street • De Witt, William, Baker, White-Hall • Dunscomb, Daniel, jun. George-Street • Dalton, Mary • Dalton, Mary (daughter) • Dallan, Stephen • Durshee, Elizabeth, Gold-Street • Dupouse, Sarah • Dissonway, David • Duncan, William, Editor of the Directory • Davenport, Joesph •Dator, Jacob • Dunscomb, Tidford • Dad, Don of Daniel, Water-Street • Daniel, Samuel • Dalton, Samuel • Dalton, William, English Gentleman, Cherry-Street • Daughton, Martha, Cherry-Street • Dyce, Francis • Dixon, James • Dodson, Mary, Cherry-Street • Drowley, James, Merchant, Cherry-Street • Dodds, Mrs. Wife of Thomas, Pearl-Street • Doyle, Mrs. • Dealing, Ann • Drawbridge, Nathaniel, Merchant, Cherry-Street • Dodd, Mary Water-Street • Doody, John, Englishman, just arrived • Diling, Mr. William-Street • Davis, Mrs. Catherine-Street • Du Bois, Elizabeth, Golden-Hill • Dyer, Ephraim • Duffel, Sarah • Dracker, William, Pearl-Street • Dunscomb, Mrs. Wife of Daniel, George-Street
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 35 HDT WHAT? INDEX
BLACK VOMIT THE YELLOW FEVER
• Dickenson, Betty, Negro Woman, Cherry-Street • Eden, Polly, Nurse,Cherry-Street •Eigle, Mary • Eustace, Mrs. •Ewen, Samuel • Eustace, Mr. Taylor, Water-Street • Ellison, James • Elliot, Arthur • Egelson, Sally • Egbert. Mr. • Fitch. James, Clerk, Pearl-Street • Fardon, William •Finch. Edward • Fee, Jacob, Painter and Glazier, Magazine-Street •Fogerty, John • Fountain, James • Fillegreen, Mr. • Fargu, Mr. Cooper, Crane-Wharf • Flanagan, Patrick • Flanel, James • Finley, John • Franklin, -----, Mate of the Ship Connecticut • French Gentleman, Pearl Street • Ford, Elijah, Water-Street • Fifter, Julia, Cherry-Street • Fanny, a Negro • Frazier, Mr. Bavaria-Lane • Fenney, Jeremiah, Mariner • Ferguson, John, Labourer, George-Street •Fay, Anne • Fay, Barnard, House-Carpenter, Water-Street • Freeman, Mrs. Wife of Silas, Cheapside • Fenton, Joseph, Sail-Maker, Pecks-Slip • Farlie, William, Grocer, Wall-Street • ----, ------, Apprentice to Flood, Joiner • Flood, Joiner, Pearl-Street • Fish, Cornelius, Water Street • Fargu, Mrs. • Frank, Black, Singing-master, Cherry-Street • Francis, Melchior, Grocer, Pearl-Street •Farrel, James • Girven, John, Book-binder • Griswold, Timothy, Mariner • Green, Samuel, Clerk, Dover Street • Gallaway, John, Scotch Gent. Water-Street • Graham, John Water-Street • Gants, Elizabeth, Servant • Gale, Joseph, Shoemaker, Water-Street • Gorham, Nancy • Green, Mary
36 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE YELLOW FEVER BLACK VOMIT
• Gleen, William, Division-Street • Graham, Elijah • Gaylor, John, Boat-builder, Water-Street • Gardener, Miss, Andrews-Alley • Gray, Joshua • Goodwin, Joseph • Grant, Edward, Labourer, Rutgers-Street • Garland, Phoebe, wife of George, Fly-Market • Grant, Allen • Gordon, John Van • Godfrey, William • Glover, John, Roosevelt-Street • Glover, Mrs. Wife of John • -----, -----, • ------,------two children under 10 years belonging to John Glover • Griffiths, William, Mariner • Gilkinson, Thomas • Gidney, Mrs. New-Slip • Gardener, Mrs. Water-Street • Gardener, Moses, Shoemaker • Griggs, Andrew, Merchant, Fletcher-Street • Griffiths, Edward • Gracey, Melville, Grocer, Catherine Street • Gilmore, Miss • Grancey, George •Gouman, Samuel • Gatty, Elizabeth • Gouby, William • Gibson, Mr. Merchant, William-Street • Grant, James • Gardner, jun. Mr. • Gabeel, David • Goddard, Freehove •Garey, Mary • Gauter, Cornelius • Gloor, William • Heake, William • Hubbs, David • Hevieard, Mr. • Hunt. Eden, Inn-Keeper, Water-Street • Holmes, John • Higginbottom, Capt. John H. • Hamilton, Mrs. • Hart, James • Hayr, Abigail • Halliday, Mrs., wife of Henry, Water-Street • Hinunnen, Gasper • Harraway, Catherine • Hunter, Peter • Hewitt, Captain H.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 37 HDT WHAT? INDEX
BLACK VOMIT THE YELLOW FEVER
• Hutchins, Mr. • Hannah, Mrs. • Hornbury, Angus •Hannah, Mary • Herring, John • Hubb. Isaac, Grocer, Catehrine-Street • Hawxhurst, Miss, Peck-Slip • Hogland, Henry, Pearl-Street • Hewitt, Charlotte • Huggerford, peter, Druggist, Pearl-Street • Huggerford, John, Physician, Beekman-Street • ----,-----, Mrs. Halliday’s sister, Water-Street • Horton, Isaac, Grocer, Fly-Market •Heymer, George • Hart, Mrs. Wife of Jacob, Pearl-Street • Harr, Samuel, Broadway • Hull, Mrs. • Harvey, James, Blacksmith • Hare, Mrs. Lombard-Street • Heyer, Walter, Clerk, Pearl-Street • Hawxhurst, Daniel, Leather-dresser, Pearl-Street • Hannibal, a black man, at Peck-Slip • Holdup, Mrs. Wife of Thomas, Fly-Market • Holdup, William • -----, -----, Harmer’s Apprentice • Heron, John, Cartman, Lombard-Street • Hoyt, Abigail, Fletcher’s wharf • Hill, John G. • Harris, Mary • Hume, Henry • Hormes, Robert • Huthwaite, John, Clerk, William-Street • Hedges, Mrs. • Header, Mrs. • Hustis, John • Houstin, William • Ivers, Hezekiah, Ship-Chandler, New-market • Inglis, Hudson, Shoemaker • Jenkins, Amiel, Merchant, Water-Street • -----, Jacamiah • Jones, Mathew, Carpenter, Roosevelt-Street • Johnson, Mrs. Near Fly-Market • Johnson, Jenny • Jennings, Mr. Pewterer, Water Street • Jessop, Amos, Blacksmith • ------, Jeremiah, Mariner • Jones, Rebecca • Jones, Thomas • Johnston, Joseph • Jones, Thomas, Brewer, Cheapside
38 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE YELLOW FEVER BLACK VOMIT
• James, Thomas • Johnston, Mary, black woman, Roosevelt-Street • Johnston, John • Jeffery, Rachel • Dutch John • Kessiak, an Indian Woman • Kelly, Richard • King, George, Labourer • Keen, Mary • Kingsland, Sally, Catherine-Street • Kelney, Hugh • Knapp, Joseph, Tavern-keeper, James-Street • Knight, Mrs., wife of Ogden, Roosevelt-Street • Kipp, Anne •Kiejoy, Hugh • Leacraft, Mrs. Wife of Willet • Low, William, Taylor, Water-Street • Lewis, Captain David • Little, Hugh • Ledyard, William, Water-Street • Loudon, Samuel, jun, Printer, Water-Street • Lockhart, Patrick • Legett, Phebe, Pearl-Street • Lang, (or Long), a Gentleman from Martinico • Lee, James, Merchant, Pearl Street • Lamb, Martin, Painter, James-Street • Little, Charles, Rutgers-Street • Lawrence, Margaret, Pearl-Street • Leader, Mrs. Roosevelt-Street • Leader, Miss, daughter of Mrs. Leader of Roosevelt-Street • Leister, Robert, Ship-carpenter, Cheapside • Le Villard, William, Merchant, Front-Street • Lamb, Mrs. • Loosey, Mrs. •Lynch, John •Lewis, James • Lowe, Mrs. Labouring woman • M’Dowel, Conway • M’Nabb, Mr. Lumber Merchant • M’Gunnigal, Patrick, Labourer • M’Kinley, Catharine • M’Murray, Jane, Water-Street • M’Kenzie, James • M’Quay, Barney, Water-Street • M;’Kinnon, Catharine • M’Donald, Polly • M’Donald, Mrs. • M’Laren, Barney, Labourer • M’Cavin, Daniel, Sailor • M’Kenzie, Mary
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 39 HDT WHAT? INDEX
BLACK VOMIT THE YELLOW FEVER
•M’Narry, Peter • M’Dougal, Neal, Taylor, Water-Street • M’Kinley, Alexander, Labourer, George-Street • M’Kinley, Mr. son of Alexander M’Kinley of George-Street • M’Kenzie, Isabel • M’Alpine, Mrs. Batavia-lane • M’Kenzie, Eleonor M’Donald, William, Baker, Chestnut Street • M’Donald, Mary • Mrs. M’Neal • M’Kenzie, Alexander • M’Nabb, Mr. Grocer • M’Donald, Anne • M’Dowel, Mr. • M’Cormick, Philip • M’Crea, Mrs. • M’Coor, John • M’Connel, Susannah • Miller, Mr. • Miller, Anne •Morris, • Mullen, Jean, Pilot • Man, Richard • Murphy, John, Labourer • Meeks, Betty • Murphy, ---- • Miller, Charles, Shoemaker, Fitches-wharf • Matthews, James • Maynard, Phinehas • Mitchell, Michael • Meen, Andrew • Miller, James • Manger, John • Mulberry, ------• Miller, Mrs. Dover-Street • ------, Apprentice to M’Bane, Blacksmith • ------, a man at Bloodgood’s • Marshall, Capt. Gilbert of Greenwich • Mills, -----, Cardmaker, Cherry-Street • ------, White Matlock’s Servant Maid • Mary, Mullatto Woman of Mr. Laight’s • Motte, Richard, Merchant, Peck-Slip • Munn, Robert, Clerk, Water-Street • Motte, William • Mott, Mr. •Maxwell, Arthur • Montgomery, Hugh • Moutier, William • Moneur, John, Brewer • Moore, William, Merchant, Water-Street • Milburns, Mr.
40 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE YELLOW FEVER BLACK VOMIT
•Mine, Mary • Moore, Isaac, Taylor, Cherry-Street • Moore, Mrs. Mother of Isaac Moore of Cherry-Street • Moncreiff, Mrs. Cherry-Street • Mills, Alexander • Mance, ----, Mariner • Mason, Mrs. • Mitchel, William • Morris, William • Mulenain, Mrs. • Mactain, Mrs. • Morris, Robert • Montgomery, Henry • Murray, Robert • Magattee, Harmanus • Manning, John • Nicholas, William • Nicholls, ---- Joiner, Hage-Street • Nelson, James, Mason, Water-Street • Neilson, Mrs. Water-Street • Neilson, Mr. junior, Water-Street • Nixon, Mr. • Nations, Sally, George-Street • Norton, Isaac • Nicholls, Mr. Fly-Market • Nicholas, Moses • Notter, Jacob • Ogilvie, Isaac, Mariner • Oswald, Col, Eleazer, Printer, of Philadelphia • Ogilvie, John, House-carpenter • Ogilvie, Anthony, Painter & Glazier, Oliver-Street • Ogilvie, Widow •Orr, James • O’Gorman, Mrs. George-Street • Oliver, William, George-Street • Paine, James • Penny, Charles, Book-binder • Packharness, john • Peebles, John • Potter, George, inn-keeper, Water-Street • Provoost, James, Merchant, Cheapside • Powell, Samuel • Parcells, Mr. Ship-carpenter, Division-Street • Plumer, Richard • Parker, Asher, Taylor, Beekman-Street • Parker, Mrs. • ------, Portuguese, Segar-maker, Water-Street • Post, Mrs. Wife of John, Water-Street • Powers, John, Ship-carpenter, Water-Street • Punderson, Thomas, Waterman, Water-Street
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 41 HDT WHAT? INDEX
BLACK VOMIT THE YELLOW FEVER
• Paine, Jaspar, Shoemaker, Charlotte-Street • Parks, Thomas, Mariner • Perry, Stephen, Blacksmith • Pearsly, Nancy, Cherry-Street • Pearsly, Deborah, Ferry-Street • Provoost, Miss Nancy, Cheapside • Pennyear, William, Ship-carpenter, Cheapside • Parker’s servant man, Front-Street • Philips, Michael, Waterman • Palmer, Abijah • Platt, Samuel •Patterson, Mrs. • Peebles, Sarah • Pears, Mr. • Quick, James, Taylor, Beekman-Street • Rhodes, James, Merchant, Pearl-Street • Rhodes, John, Water-Street • Richards, William • Ross, William G. • Ricker, Nancy • Reeves, James • Robinson, William • Ramsay, James • Rose, Sarah • Ryan, Edmund • Rooper, Mr. Oysterman • Rooper, Mrs. Wife to Mr. Rooper the Oysterman • Rogers, Polly • Rogers, Captain Matthew • Robinson, John, Clerk, Pearl-Street • Rose, William, Catharine-Street • Robson, William, Tin-smith, Water-Street • Rawlinson, Thomas, Painter, Pearl-Street • Robertson, John, Merchant Taylor, Water-Street • Roosevelt, Mrs. Wife to Oliver, Cherry-Street • Roger, Isaiah, Schoolmaster, Lombard-Street • Ramsay, James • Reeves, Barnabas, Grocer, New-Slip • Ricker, John, Sail-maker, James-Street • Reeves, Widow, New-Slip • Reed, Thomas • Ringes, Widow, New-Slip • Reed, Thomas • Ringes, John, Clerk, Cherry-Street •Rogers, Owen • Roome, Mr. • Royal, Patrick • Russel, Francis •Ray, James • Russel, Susannah
42 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE YELLOW FEVER BLACK VOMIT
• Richards, Anne • Rosier, James B. • Stratten, William, Cabinet-maker, Chestnut-Street • Sing, Mr. • Smith, Elisha, Clerk, Pearl-Street • Smith, Mrs. • Smith, Catharine • Smith, Mr. a young man in Water-Street • Smith, William • Smith, Mary, Water-Street • Smith, Mrs. Water-Street • Smith, Mrs. Wife of Robert, Catharine-Street • Smith, Michael, Barber, Cherry-Street • Smith, Captain John • Smith, Mrs. wife of Michael, Cherry-Street • Smith, Mrs. Water-Street • Smith, Mary, Servant Maid, Water-Street • Smith, Daniel • Smith, Julia • ------, Sarah • Sim, George • Statterly, John, Mariner • Skinner, Abraham • Soulag, John • Scott. William, Callico Galzier •Scot, John • Sands, Thomas • Sands, Phebe •Sands, Mary • Sprainger, John • Sherman, ------• Shemil, Mrs. • Stobo, William, Taylor • Shute, Frederick, Tavern-keeper, Cherry-Street • Shute, Mr. brother of Frederick Shute the Tavern-keeper, George-Street • Sims, Tho. Lumber Merchant, Mulberry-Street • Sim, George, Porter Bottler, Water-Street • Skinner, Abraham, Student at law, Cherry-Street • Scudder, George, Catharine-Street • Seaman, Mrs. wife to Thomas, Pecks-slip • Stewart, Abigail • Sheffield, ----, Water-Street • Sheffield, Capt. Aaron • Sline, John, Ship-carpenter, Water-Street • Sline, Anne • Stout, William • Sprainger, Mary, Cherry-Street • Shourt, Mr. • Seaman, Samuel • Simonton, Robert
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 43 HDT WHAT? INDEX
BLACK VOMIT THE YELLOW FEVER
• Shaw, ----- • Sanderson, Thomas • Skaats, Rynier • Sanders, Mrs. • Stymets, Fred. One of the Committee, Nassau-Street • ------, Sarah • ------, William, a Sailor • ------,------, a Swede Sailor • ------, Nicholas, a Sailor, Crane-Wharf • -----, Jeremy, a Sailor of Brig Hiram • ------, • ------Two Negroes, Names unknown • Dr. Malachia Treat, Health-Officer, died the 29th of July; supposed to be the first victim, and probably caught the infection on board the brig Zephyr, from Port-au-Prince • Thistle, Samuel, Oysterman • Taylor, John • Tillinghast, Charles, Dep. Collector, Cherry-Street • Tate, William • Travers, Bartholomew, Blacksmith, Water-Street • Thomas, John, Shoemaker • Tweed, Philip, Blacksmith • Tappan, Mrs. • Twit, William, Water-Street • Thompson, George, Labourer, Skinner-Street • Thompson, James, Book-binder, Pearl-Street • Thompson, Asa • Thompson, John • Titus, Mrs. mother of Timothy, Cherry-Street • Tropper, Mrs. George-Street • Turner, Capt. William • Thorp, Joseph, Wall-Street • Tydgaat, Jacob, Stationer, Beekman-Slip • Thornbury, Agnes • -----, Thomas, Blacksmith, Water-Street • Todwin, Joseph • Toby, William, Labourer •Tidd, Ann • Tier, Mrs. • Tomkins, Eleazer • Underwood, Elijah • Varian, Michael, Merchant, Maiden-lane • Vannerman, Anthony • Vallen William • Vanderondrie, Mr. • Vincent, George • Varian, Michael, Butcher, Bowery • Varck, John, Water-Street • Van Gordon, John • Van Dyk, Mary, Rutgers-Street • Vander Enden, John, Merchant
44 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE YELLOW FEVER BLACK VOMIT
• -----, ------, a lad of Mr. Fellows’s • Van Peet, Christopher •Verriner, John • Wells, Horace, Silver-Smith, Pearl • Wallace, Samuel, joiner, Cross-Street • Wyley, Mrs. • Williams, Ephraim • Watson, James • Whiteleg, Mary • Wright, -----, Butcher • Wright, Mrs. wife to Wright the Butcher • Welsh, Barbarra • Williams, Mr. • Whiton, Mr. Catharine-Street • Whiting, Miss, George-Street • Wright, Elias • Williams, Richard, Watch-maker • Webster, Lewis • Wentworth, Col. Michael • Woods, Thomas, Baker, Gold-Street • Woods, Jeremiah, Tanner, Ferry-Street • Wick, Jesse, Deputy Sheriff • Webb, Nathan, Druggist, Pearl-Street • West, Thomas, Upholsterer, Water-Street • Wayland, Levi, Printer, Water-Street • Watson, James, jun. Near the Battery • Welsh, Mrs. wife to James, Roosevelt-Street • Wieeson, William • Willing, William • Wheeler, Silas • Wheeler, James, Merchant, William-Street • Wise, Thomas • Windhart, Dennis, Ferry-Street • Will, Thomas • Wild, Motly • Wall, Thomas • Whiteman, John •West, Mr. • Warner, Thomas, Anne-Street • Wood, Henry • Weeks, Eleazar • Woodward, William • Youles, George • Young, John • Youngs, Joseph, Carpenter, Division-Street • Young, Isaac, Farmer, from Fort Pitt • Young, James • ----,----- • ----,----- Two men belonging to the Ship William - names unknown. ______
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 45 HDT WHAT? INDEX
BLACK VOMIT THE YELLOW FEVER
New-York, Printed NOVEMBER 7th, 1795 Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1798 in New York By Bob Arnebeck The first victims of yellow fever in New York, stricken at the end of July and early August, blamed the schooner Fox which arrived in late July from Jeremie. Doctors, however, did not take the accusation seriously. This was not a case of diagnosis being made difficult by the victims being poor and intemperate. Among the first deaths were prominent merchants. However, the area where the fever was centered, Coenties wharf, had been the site of a small epidemic in 1797. In vain, the health committee had pressed the common council to enforce a clean up there. That the fever returned to that very filthy spot seemed a proof of the local origin of the disease. Ships from the West Indies docked up and down the long waterfront. The coincidence of the fever returning to Coenties wharf also lulled the health committee into thinking that, just as in '97, the epidemic there would be short lived and unremarkable. Indeed, judging from his journal, Elihu Smith hardly paid any attention to it, though the first victim, 74 year old Melancton Smith was a friend. Instead Elihu Smith was busy getting out the first number of the second volume of the Medical Repository, forming a mineralogical society and enjoying the company of Charles Brockden Brown who was staying with him and his roommate, the lawyer William Johnson. Brown was busy completing Wieland. Smith read and discussed the work with his friend and helped arrange for its publication. Very likely it was Smith who suggested a footnote in the novel which referred readers to the section of Darwin's Zoonomia in which mania similar to Wieland's was discussed. Not until August 25 did Smith and Brown take any notice of the yellow fever epidemic in the city. “The sickness increases in town,” Smith noted in his journal. “Heavy rains, uncleansed sinks, and a continuance of unexampled heat,” Brown reported in a letter to his brother in Philadelphia, “have within these ten days given birth to the yellow fever among us in its epidemical form. Death and alarms have rapidly multiplied, but it is hoped that now, as formerly, its influence will be limited to one place.” Brown felt no concern for his own safety since he lived far enough from the infected wharf, “and my mode of living, from which animal food and spirituous liquors are wholly excluded, gives the utmost security.” Living as Rush prescribed, the two young men were fearless. In his treatment of yellow fever patients, Smith bled, purged with mercury and induced salivation, always with good results. Alexander Anderson, who had been staff physician at Bellevue Hospital during the 1795 epidemic, exhibited a fearlessness bordering on the blase. The summer of 1798 had not been an easy one for him. He and his wife's first child had died three months after birth. Struck by the frequency of infant mortality in the past, some twentieth century historians argue that 18th century couples accepted and adjusted easily to the occurrence. At his son's death Anderson was brave and “in perfect health and strength,” but a few days later he began “to droop.” He had a
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colleague “draw about a pound of blood.” That afforded relief and he had it done the next day too. The morning after he “woke up mauling [his] wife thinking a beast at her breast.” Within a week he began taking “a dose of nitre and calomel 5 1/2 grains,” which “contributed to paint objects in fancy colors.” Two weeks after that he began drinking wine in the morning “for medicinal purposes,” and soon added opium to the dose. His wife fared no better and, as yellow fever spread, left to stay with her mother on Long Island. Anderson had his first yellow fever patient on August 11, a man whose wife had left him then returned and sent for the doctor. She didn't think her husband would recover but begged Anderson to save him “for the sake of her poor children.” “I must say,” Anderson wrote in his diary, “I was somewhat pleas'd to see her punished for her cowardly flight.” The man was sent to Bellevue by the health committee where he died. Dr. Rodgers called Anderson in for three consultations on other yellow fever patients. Soon Anderson found himself vomiting and feeling weak. He thought nothing of it, and took 8 grains of calomel which forced him to spend a day in bed. Then he wavered in his Rushite convictions, filling his empty stomach with a beefsteak, which “quite” cured him. On August 30 he bumped into Dr. Bayley, the city's health officer, who asked him to suggest a staff physician for Bellevue. Anderson went to the health committee and got the job himself. He tried to get a colleague, Dr. Chickering, to take his patients, two children with yellow fever, and was appalled when the doctor timidly refused. Noah Webster returned to New York in August, and wrote editorials for the Commercial Advertiser, then managed by his nephew, which also demonstrated how in the eyes of Rush's disciples yellow fever completely lost its terror. (A revision the master was never able to make.) An August 22 editorial celebrated the country's lack of vigilance against supposed contagion. “It is a most agreeable circumstance that the citizens of the United States have become so well acquainted with the nature of the Yellow Fever, that they no longer cut off communication between the places where it prevails, and where it does not.” Instead of night watches, guards and persecution, New York welcomed refugees from Philadelphia. Indeed New York was wise not to automatically quarantine ships as Philadelphia did because keeping ships loaded in the harbor only increased the likelihood of putrefaction on the ship which would make it unhealthy and dangerous to the community. New York's regulations were “more safe for the city, and less troublesome to the merchant; while we freely receive all fugitives from infected places, afford them all possible aid, and suffer no inconvenience from such acts of humanity.” That said Webster soon returned to Hartford. When addressing the fever, others bewailed Philadelphia's fate and discounted the threat to New York. On August 14 a torrential rainstorm flooded many cellars in New York prompting a call for the health committee to inspect every house and see that cellars were pumped out and purified. But for the next two weeks no one blamed any sickness on those floods. Judge James Kent wrote to his brother on August 15 that he thought that “such periodical
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alarms and confusion” in Philadelphia “must in the end go a great way to ruin the commerce and prosperity of that city.” In an August 25 letter the Rev. John Rodgers, father of the doctor, implored God to save Philadelphia and shrugged off “some few cases of bilious fever with us.” He thought the city “in general” was “healthy as much so as I have known it for many years at this season.” William Robinson, a Quaker merchant, wrote to Philadelphia friends on August 16 that he had heard of “two or three people” dying of yellow fever, a typical occurrence for years. “On the whole,” he added, “this city is in a very clean, sweet and healthy state -- and I know of no alarm and have not heard of a single family moving out except as usual on acct of the heat.” Robinson soon revised that estimate. “Within 6 or 8 days,” he wrote on August 27, “twelve or fourteen persons have been attacked within my knowledge, five or six of whom have died.” He listed five victims by name, and added, “a number of families in our quarter are moving out of town -- but the alarm is not yet general in the city.” Robinson moved his wife and daughter from their east side home and tried the best he could to stay out too, but business usually kept him commuting in from their refuge in Greenwich, until he got the fever. The Commercial Advertiser tried to keep those deaths in perspective. On August 30 it ridiculed a letter printed in Philadelphia that claimed one hundred died in one day on New York's Golden Hill and Cliff Street. Perhaps 10 people had died there but the western part of the city was “probably as free from sickness as it was ever known to be at this season.” On the 28th the health committee congratulated the governor on the epidemic around Coenties wharf ending, but added that “unhappily” there was sickness elsewhere, “principally in unventilated situations.” The committee did not think of ordering evacuations. It was content to go after merchants who did have putrefying beef in their cellars. A writer privy to the investigations of the health committee and supporting all their actions wrote a long report on the fever in early September. He cited clusters of cases and local causes for each: new made ground, crowded buildings, swampy lots and/or offensive sewers. He ridiculed claims that the fever was imported or arose from coffee thrown on a wharf. He argued that the death rate was not out of line for the season. On September 2 Elihu Smith wrote to his friend in Hartford that he thought the flight from the city was a reaction, “certainly disproportionate to the cause.” He estimated that 600 were sick and that one in ten died. Since the evacuation the number of new cases was “small.” Unlike their colleagues in Philadelphia, New York doctors exuded confidence. On September 6 Dr. Samuel Bard wrote to the newspapers heralding a remedy for the most feared symptom of yellow fever, black vomit. His partner Dr. David Hosack had shown that “lime-water mixed with an equal quantity of new milk” had cured three cases in which black vomiting had begun. Several articles appeared in New York papers attesting to the virtues of alkaline medicines and lime as a disinfectant. “LIME has subdued the poisonous vapor issuing from the sewer of Burling-slip...,” boasted a September 7 article. “LIME WATER,
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soda and pearl ash are capable of restraining the black vomit.” Dr. Samuel Mitchill, the chief promoter of alkaline remedies, had by September united his new understanding of the fever with Rush's ideas. There were three states of yellow fever. In the bilious and vomiting state, alkaline remedies were called for; bleeding was proper when the patient was in a state of high excitement; when the patient was a stupor, Mitchill thought the disease should be treated like acute scurvy and an effort had to be made to get oxygen into the system and “septon” [his word for nitrogen] out. To do that he prescribed “neutral mixtures, lemonade, cider, peaches, pears and apples.” The trio of Brown, Johnson and Smith maintained their devil may care attitude about the epidemic despite Smith confining himself to bed after getting too much sun on a sail to Long Island to see a patient. They wrote a joint letter to their friend William Dunlap, the painter and theatrical producer who as always in the late summer was in Perth Amboy. Brown joked about “this plaguey fever at our doors, in our cupboards & in our beds.” Johnson marvelled at the fever's “unaccountable origin,... amazing attributes, and... inexplicable operations,” leaving it to Smith to explain what was going on. From his bed the doctor assured Dunlap that while it was unsafe to be on certain East Side streets, the fever was not as mortal as it was in 1795. One in ten died, “& that not more than one in a hundred would perish, with early attention & faithful nursing.” On the same day Brown wrote to his worried brother in a more serious vein. Smith assured him that not one out of nine died when properly nursed. Brown thought it would be wise to leave if the fever reached their end of town. By becoming sick he would become a burden. However, he knew Smith would never leave. “If I run the risk of requiring to be nursed,” Brown reasoned, “I must not forget that others may require to be nursed by me, in a disease where personal attentions are all in all.” Out at Bellevue, Alexander Anderson was his old sardonic self once again, while he tried to deal with 20 patients, four of whom died on his first day there. With 14 newly admitted patients, Anderson had to fend off “an Irishman who ask'd to stay and nurse his sweetheart at night.” He returned to town to see his patients there, and was amused to find that Dr. Chickering had taken the fever. They joked that when he recovered he would “practice without fear.” Unfortunately Anderson was too busy to put much color in his diary. A patient he dismissed as cured came back sick and promptly died; a nurse got sick. Then on the afternoon of September 5, his father came to report that Dr. Chickering had died and Anderson's brother was sick. Faced with his own brother in a dangerous condition, Anderson lost his confidence. He conferred with Dr. Bayley about a better way to treat patients, but the older doctor seemed “at a loss.” As his brother got worse, his father became ill. On the 8th after going to Bellevue thinking his brother better, he returned to find him dead. As his father got sicker, Anderson sought out Dr. Dingley for consultation. Anderson had bled him twice, and was disappointed when Dingley only prescribed “innocent things.” Anderson saw to it that his father got calomel. On the 10th his father was so ill that Anderson had to
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resign from Bellevue to spend all his time with him and when able “practic'd among the neighbors many of whom are taken ill.” His father died on September 12. Finding that his mother showed “heroic fortitude,” Anderson went to see his wife on Long Island. To his shock he found her looking ghastly, emaciated and spitting blood. She died the next day. Then he returned to his mother, and was surprised at both her and his own composure. His mother was even lively until the 16th when she was seized with the fever. He gave her medicine immediately and for awhile thought she would recover. A black nurse helped care for her which allowed Anderson to see other patients. His mother became difficult, complaining of being neglected and refusing to take medicine. She died on the morning of the 21st, “delirious all night and suffered much pain.” A few blocks to the west, Elihu Smith and his friends were still sanguine. Smith recovered from his indisposition ascribing “his preservation from death entirely to his vegetable diet” and to not visiting patients when he was sick. Smith sent a long report on the New York epidemic to Rush written very much in the style of the master, a potpourri of incisive generalizations. More natives were getting sick than in 1795, which led to their being fewer deaths because natives, better educated and wealthier, were quicker to get medical attention. He thought the number of sick decreasing and since “the complaint being in great measure local, and the inhabitants of the pestilential district having mostly fled, the extension of the sickness is not greatly to be apprehended.” There was no question of the fever being imported. Even importationists like David Hosack agreed. Few doctors thought the fever contagious and even the general populace agreed. People left “not from fear of the sick, but of the town.” There was no hesitation to nurse a sick friend, “likewise one great cause of the less mortality among us.” As for remedies, alkalies such as soda, potash and lime water invariably relieved victims of “all commotions of the alimentary canal.” Smith asked Rush about his experience with emetics and promised to publish his letter on them in the Medical Repository. Like Anderson, Smith was soon humbled by the epidemic. A young Venetian nobleman, Dr. Joseph Scandella, had come to America to broaden his education and took a particular interest in yellow fever. Smith had befriended him, as did a number of men of science including Rush. In August Scandella sailed for Europe from Philadelphia, then the leaky ship returned to New York. Early in the epidemic Scandella joined Smith on his rounds. Then in early September he returned to Philadelphia telling Smith that he went “in search of his baggage.” On September 11, Smith learned that Scandella had returned to New York and was ill with the fever. He rescued him from unfriendly inns, and he, Brown, and Johnson nursed the unlucky Italian. On the 13th Smith wrote to Rush again, reporting that the mortality had increased. He blamed that on the fact that most of those getting sick were poor people who didn't call for doctors in time. His confidence in Rush's depleting remedies in combination with alkalies had not diminished. He thought that the alkalies aided the cure by “partially decomposing the
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calomel and thus diminishing the tendency of this latter medicine to irritate the stomach.” He revealed that Scandella was his patient and closed the letter by assuring Rush that “all that the faculty of New York can do for his relief will be attempted.” Smith noted in his journal that after being very ill, Scandella seemed better. On the 14th he seemed “much better, to all appearance.” On the 15th Smith decided his friend could not recover. On the 16th Smith himself was very ill. The day after the publication of Wieland, his first novel, Charles Brockden Brown, a frail and sickly man, had to share duties with Johnson as they nursed Scandella who lay in Smith's bed and Smith who lay in a bed in the next room. Before his attack Smith had made a sobering reassessment of the dangers of yellow fever. Distraught at the havoc the fever made in a house where he had six patients, with two so sick they had to be sent to Bellevue where one died, Smith “became sensible of the disproportionate hazard which he incurred, and ... determined, as soon as his friend Scandella had recovered or perished and his present patients had been gotten rid of, to withdraw from town.” The best Brown and Johnson could do, after Scandella died, was to remove Smith to the “spacious, healthfully situated” house of Johnson's brother Horace. In a letter written the 17th Brown tried to describe how bad it was in New York, how much worse than Philadelphia. A greater proportion of the population died and “the victims to this disease have been in innumerable cases selected from the highest and most respectable class of inhabitants.” On the 18th Brown also seemed to take the fever. Dr. Miller, who along with Smith's other co-editor, Mitchill, tried to treat Scandella and Smith, took Brown to his own house. In Smith's case the new alkaline treatment did not work. Nothing could “compose his stomach.” Most of the time he was in a stupor, but when revived he could answer questions rationally. Smith pressed upon his colleagues the importance of inducing salivation. Like Smith, Miller was an old student of Rush's and followed his prescriptions. Heroic measures failed Smith. Because of his vomiting, calomel would not stay in his system. Mercury rubs failed to bring the hoped for soreness and saliva. He revived enough mid-day on the 19th to see that his vomit was black, “pronounced the word 'decomposition' and died.” Out at his Perth Amboy retreat William Dunlap had just replied to his jolly friends, inviting Brown and Johnson to come to Perth Amboy and “to Elihu, my apprehensions for his safety & my confidence in his doing his duty.” When he heard of Smith's imminent death, his usually flinty diary betrayed some emotion: “Notwithstanding my firmest attempts this stroke bears hard upon me.” Just after he learned of Smith's death, Dr. Rodgers, who weakened by fatigue had left the city, called with the news that Amasa Dingley, with whom Smith had first explored the nature of yellow fever three years before, had died of the disease. Brown recovered, and before he and Johnson came to Amboy, he wrote to Dunlap, “Most ardently do I long to shut out this city from my view....” And to his brother, he wrote the day Smith died: “O the folly of prediction and the vanity of systems.” Drs. Miller and Mitchill did not make a case study of Smith's
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death. Miller told Brown that “no case was more dreadful and infinitely malignant.” While lessons were often drawn from their recoveries, the deaths of doctors were seldom detailed. The hazards they faced during an epidemic explained the high mortality in their ranks. Though men like Scandella and Smith, for whose cleanliness, temperance and morality he could vouch lay on the verge of death, Mitchill blamed “the inhabitants [who] have really poisoned their city by the accumulation of excrement, putrid provisions and every unclean thing,” plus their “gross animal diet” and intemperance. “If some of our citizens breathed air as pure and balmy as the breezes of Eden,” Mitchill wrote to Noah Webster on September 17, “they would engender this sickness by their way of life. They would breed it within them. To get the better of these visitations will therefore require more than municipal regulations. An alteration, and a considerable one too, of housekeeping and modes of life will be necessary.” Rush's reaction to Smith's death is not known. A letter he wrote to Smith's parents is not extant. New Yorkers did not dwell on the accumulation of sorrows. With no family to flee to and with friends calling for his services, Anderson resolved to stay until the epidemic ended. He gave up Rush's mode of practice, began using laudanum and stimulating medicines, and was surprised and gratified by his success. (Once the epidemic did end, he stopped being a doctor and devoted all his energies to engraving. Dr. Young, his first teacher, was surprised at his decision. But as Anderson, who became one of the country's most beloved engravers, wrote in his memoirs fifty years later, “the succession of calamities” he experienced in 1798 “seemed rather too severe.”) The health committee, the city's editors, doctors and even citizens in candid private letters continued to think that the crisis was manageable. New Yorkers clung to every healthy block as evidence that it did not have as bad an epidemic as its rival port. Rev. Samuel Miller wrote that he avoided the docks and wharves; a broker wrote that as long as he confined himself between Trinity Church and the upper part of the Battery he felt safe. Throughout September the health committee dealt with local nuisances like sewers and bad smells emanating from cellars. Here indeed was a community living and dying by Rush's principles, although certainly commercial considerations inspired the city's leaders, more than devotion to the ideas of Rush, Webster and most of the city's doctors. That brave front was easier to put up because of the headlines that came from Philadelphia. Many ports were stricken but none could rival the misery of Philadelphia. For the first time, banks left the city, prompted not only by sickness and death among employees but by a robbery of the Bank of Pennsylvania on September 2. Two days later the bank moved its offices and valuables to a school house in Germantown. On the 5th the Bank of North America followed. By September 6 the city's market had moved ten block to the west at Market and Broad Streets. On September 11, James Smith's store was robbed. A week after that, only the quick shooting of Alderman Robert Wharton, who was supervising the jail after the jailor fled from fear of the fever, prevented an escape by
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several convicts. The newspapers that spread the stories of the city's crisis were decimated by the epidemic. Fifty-one men in the printing trade got the fever. The two leaders of the partisan press died; Bache of the Aurora on September 11, and John Fenno, Sr., of the Gazette of the United States on the 16th. Fenno's wife died on the 6th. (No one made any issue of the medical treatment Bache and Fenno received. Republican though he was, Bache did not take Rush's cure. A French doctor gave him baths and gentle medicines. That dismayed Bache's sister who when she visited found the house virtually flooded because the tub leaked. She worried that the damp would harm Mrs. Bache who was in the last days of pregnancy with the family's fourth child. Perhaps taking a lesson from that, when Bache's assistant William Duane got the fever he took 212 grains of mercury and though his “gums [were] inflamed, teeth loose and [his] face swelled,” he survived to marry Bache's widow and carry on the Republican traditions of the Aurora.) The most affecting token of Philadelphia's despair was the death of Mayor Hillary Baker, who had stayed to relieve the distress of those who remained in the city. “Compared with this dreadful situation,” the New York Daily Advertiser pointed out after describing the devastation of Philadelphia, “the inhabitants of New York have little grounds for murmuring. Large districts and several principal streets have remained almost untouched by the fell destroyer. A great number of rich families have continued in the city, who had ample means of removal. Many gentlemen, particularly the collector and deputy collector, and those belonging to the insurance offices, and various other public departments and branches of business, have been in the constant habit of spending five hours in town every day. The banks have not thought of moving, and not more than four-sevenths of our inhabitants, if that many, have left town.” Only Philadelphia's rival for political pre-eminence exceeded New York for tasteless commentary during the crisis. A letter from the new city of Washington, where a plunge in real estate prices had crippled development and threatened progress on the Capitol which had to be ready for Congress in 1800, extolled the site of the new capital. It was “remarkable for the salubrity of its air, the purity of its water, and the cheapness of provisions and fuel; and that whilst the yellow fever stalks with desolating strides in some of the principal towns of the Union, the Federal City, destined at some future day to rival the glory of ancient Rome, bids fair to be secure from this ravager of cities, and to enjoy from its peculiar situation and construction an envious scene of health.” Most in the nation did not indulge in making invidious distinctions as the sickly season progressed because no place seemed safe from yellow fever. In late September the fever flared up again in Boston causing a new panic. A new arrival at a suburban refuge reported on the 24th that “the number of new cases was 40, many dead and a dying, greatly beyond any preceding time and the people preparing to remove and that the doctors now call the disorder the Plague.” Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Wilmington, Delaware, began providing counts of fever cases and
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deaths. In the northern port only a handful were victims. Between August 7 and September 23, Wilmington counted 127 dead, all but 8 of those adults. On the 23rd alone 10 died. Chester, Pennsylvania, then a small village, also reported deaths. New London, Connecticut, was also hit by yellow fever. Congressman Joshua Coit was one of its victims. A September 9 letter from nearby Norwich reported that based on the proportion of victims to New London's population, the epidemic was “greater... than has ever been experienced on our continent.” The city was nearly deserted and yet people still died. “The skill of our physicians though many of them are eminent in their profession, appears to be wholly baffled with this fever; and there seems no other security but flight.” In a September 20 letter to his brother, William Russell, a Boston merchant, contemplated “the dreadful calamity with which this country is now visited in each of the commercial cities to a degree beyond all former precedents. Distressing and alarming as it has been upon former occasions it is far more so upon this and the direful consequences have attained an excess which has spread alarm through the whole continent.” Alice Cogswell who was recovering from a cancer operation in Princeton might have been expected to ignore the epidemics in light of her own troubles. Her brother in New York had fled in time, and her brother who was a doctor was out of harm's way in Hartford. But the epidemic served as a metaphor for her own insecurity: “What sad havoc does this pestilential fever make with the inhabitants of this world, wives torn from their husbands, husbands torn from their wives, and in some instances whole families swept to eternity without one relict left to mourn their loss. It is enough to make ones heart weep drops of blood, or rather streams, my soul turns with horror from this scene of wretchedness and misery to the world beyond the grave where there is no more sorrow or grief. It is the god of heaven that thus desolates the world and he has just reason for it....”
1796
Governor John Jay, in response to the threat of a yellow fever epidemic in New-York, ordered the construction of a Lazaretto on Bedloe’s (now Liberty) Island.
1797
Another outbreak of the yellow fever in Philadelphia would result in 1,292 deaths between August and November.
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1797. The town was visited by the yellow fever. Many deaths occurred; the schools were suspended, streets deserted, and consternation depicted on every countenance. President John Adams visited the town in August, stopping at Esek Aldrich’s Hotel (now Washington Hotel,) and was honored with testimonials of great respect, with the ringing of bells, firing of cannon, a military escort, and an address from the Town’s Committee. The College edifice was brilliantly illuminated in the evening. COLLEGE OF RHODE ISLAND
1798
Deaths in Philadelphia due to an outbreak of the yellow fever, between August and November, were 3,637.
In New-York, 2,086 people died of the yellow fever: The first victims of yellow fever in New York, stricken at the end of July and early August, blamed the schooner Fox which arrived in late July from Jeremie.3 Doctors, however, did not take the accusation seriously. This was not a case of diagnosis being made difficult by the victims being poor and intemperate. Among the first deaths were prominent merchants. However, the area where the fever was centered, Coenties wharf, had been the site of a small epidemic in 1797. In vain, the health committee had pressed the common council to enforce a clean up there. That the fever returned to that very filthy spot seemed a proof of the local origin of the disease. Ships from the West Indies docked up and down the long waterfront. The coincidence of the fever returning to Coenties wharf also lulled the health committee into thinking that, just as in ‘97, the epidemic there would be short lived and unremarkable. Indeed, judging from his journal, Elihu Smith hardly paid any attention to it, though the first victim, 74 year old Melancton Smith was a friend. Instead Elihu Smith was busy getting out the first number of the second volume of the Medical Repository, forming a mineralogical society and enjoying the company of Charles Brockden Brown who was staying with him and his roommate, the lawyer William Johnson. Brown was busy completing Wieland. Smith read and discussed the work with his friend and helped arrange for its publication. Very likely it was Smith who suggested a footnote in the novel which referred readers to the section of Darwin’s ZOONOMIA in which mania similar to Wieland’s was discussed. Not until August 25 did Smith and Brown take any notice of the yellow fever epidemic in the city. “The sickness increases in town,” Smith noted in his journal. “Heavy rains, uncleansed sinks, and a continuance of unexampled heat,” Brown reported in a letter to his brother in Philadelphia, “have within these ten days given birth to the yellow fever among us in its epidemical form. Death 3. This material was written by Bob Arnebeck. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 55 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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and alarms have rapidly multiplied, but it is hoped that now, as formerly, its influence will be limited to one place.” Brown felt no concern for his own safety since he lived far enough from the infected wharf, “and my mode of living, from which animal food and spirituous liquors are wholly excluded, gives the utmost security.” Living as Rush prescribed, the two young men were fearless. In his treatment of yellow fever patients, Smith bled, purged with mercury and induced salivation, always with good results. Alexander Anderson, who had been staff physician at Bellevue Hospital during the 1795 epidemic, exhibited a fearlessness bordering on the blase. The summer of 1798 had not been an easy one for him. He and his wife’s first child had died three months after birth. Struck by the frequency of infant mortality in the past, some twentieth century historians argue that 18th century couples accepted and adjusted easily to the occurrence. At his son’s death Anderson was brave and “in perfect health and strength,” but a few days later he began “to droop.” He had a colleague “draw about a pound of blood.” That afforded relief and he had it done the next day too. The morning after he “woke up mauling [his] wife thinking a beast at her breast.” Within a week he began taking “a dose of nitre and calomel 5 1/2 grains,” which “contributed to paint objects in fancy colors.” Two weeks after that he began drinking wine in the morning “for medicinal purposes,” and soon added opium to the dose. His wife fared no better and, as yellow fever spread, left to stay with her mother on Long Island. Anderson had his first yellow fever patient on August 11, a man whose wife had left him then returned and sent for the doctor. She didn’t think her husband would recover but begged Anderson to save him “for the sake of her poor children.” “I must say,” Anderson wrote in his diary, “I was somewhat pleas’d to see her punished for her cowardly flight.” The man was sent to Bellevue by the health committee where he died. Dr. Rodgers called Anderson in for three consultations on other yellow fever patients. Soon Anderson found himself vomiting and feeling weak. He thought nothing of it, and took 8 grains of calomel which forced him to spend a day in bed. Then he wavered in his Rushite convictions, filling his empty stomach with a beefsteak, which “quite” cured him. On August 30 he bumped into Dr. Bayley, the city’s health officer, who asked him to suggest a staff physician for Bellevue. Anderson went to the health committee and got the job himself. He tried to get a colleague, Dr. Chickering, to take his patients, two children with yellow fever, and was appalled when the doctor timidly refused. Noah Webster returned to New York in August, and wrote editorials for the Commercial Advertiser, then managed by his nephew, which also demonstrated how in the eyes of Rush’s disciples yellow fever completely lost its terror. (A revision the master was never able to make.) An August 22 editorial celebrated the country’s lack of vigilance against supposed contagion. “It is a most agreeable circumstance that the citizens of the United States have become so well acquainted with the nature of the Yellow Fever, that they no longer cut off communication between the places where it prevails, and where
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it does not.” Instead of night watches, guards and persecution, New York welcomed refugees from Philadelphia. Indeed New York was wise not to automatically quarantine ships as Philadelphia did because keeping ships loaded in the harbor only increased the likelihood of putrefaction on the ship which would make it unhealthy and dangerous to the community. New York’s regulations were “more safe for the city, and less troublesome to the merchant; while we freely receive all fugitives from infected places, afford them all possible aid, and suffer no inconvenience from such acts of humanity.” That said Webster soon returned to Hartford. When addressing the fever, others bewailed Philadelphia’s fate and discounted the threat to New York. On August 14 a torrential rainstorm flooded many cellars in New York prompting a call for the health committee to inspect every house and see that cellars were pumped out and purified. But for the next two weeks no one blamed any sickness on those floods. Judge James Kent wrote to his brother on August 15 that he thought that “such periodical alarms and confusion” in Philadelphia “must in the end go a great way to ruin the commerce and prosperity of that city.” In an August 25 letter the Rev. John Rodgers, father of the doctor, implored God to save Philadelphia and shrugged off “some few cases of bilious fever with us.” He thought the city “in general” was “healthy as much so as I have known it for many years at this season.” William Robinson, a Quaker merchant, wrote to Philadelphia friends on August 16 that he had heard of “two or three people” dying of yellow fever, a typical occurrence for years. “On the whole,” he added, “this city is in a very clean, sweet and healthy state -- and I know of no alarm and have not heard of a single family moving out except as usual on acct of the heat.” Robinson soon revised that estimate. “Within 6 or 8 days,” he wrote on August 27, “twelve or fourteen persons have been attacked within my knowledge, five or six of whom have died.” He listed five victims by name, and added, “a number of families in our quarter are moving out of town -- but the alarm is not yet general in the city.” Robinson moved his wife and daughter from their east side home and tried the best he could to stay out too, but business usually kept him commuting in from their refuge in Greenwich, until he got the fever. The Commercial Advertiser tried to keep those deaths in perspective. On August 30 it ridiculed a letter printed in Philadelphia that claimed one hundred died in one day on New York’s Golden Hill and Cliff Street. Perhaps 10 people had died there but the western part of the city was “probably as free from sickness as it was ever known to be at this season.” On the 28th the health committee congratulated the governor on the epidemic around Coenties wharf ending, but added that “unhappily” there was sickness elsewhere, “principally in unventilated situations.” The committee did not think of ordering evacuations. It was content to go after merchants who did have putrefying beef in their cellars. A writer privy to the investigations of the health committee and supporting all their actions wrote a long report on the fever in early September. He cited clusters of cases and local causes for each: new made
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ground, crowded buildings, swampy lots and/or offensive sewers. He ridiculed claims that the fever was imported or arose from coffee thrown on a wharf. He argued that the death rate was not out of line for the season. On September 2 Elihu Smith wrote to his friend in Hartford that he thought the flight from the city was a reaction, “certainly disproportionate to the cause.” He estimated that 600 were sick and that one in ten died. Since the evacuation the number of new cases was “small.” Unlike their colleagues in Philadelphia, New York doctors exuded confidence. On September 6 Dr. Samuel Bard wrote to the newspapers heralding a remedy for the most feared symptom of yellow fever, black vomit. His partner Dr. David Hosack had shown that “lime-water mixed with an equal quantity of new milk” had cured three cases in which black vomiting had begun. Several articles appeared in New York papers attesting to the virtues of alkaline medicines and lime as a disinfectant. “LIME has subdued the poisonous vapor issuing from the sewer of Burling-slip...,” boasted a September 7 article. “LIME WATER, soda and pearl ash are capable of restraining the black vomit.” Dr. Samuel Mitchill, the chief promoter of alkaline remedies, had by September united his new understanding of the fever with Rush’s ideas. There were three states of yellow fever. In the bilious and vomiting state, alkaline remedies were called for; bleeding was proper when the patient was in a state of high excitement; when the patient was a stupor, Mitchill thought the disease should be treated like acute scurvy and an effort had to be made to get oxygen into the system and “septon” [his word for nitrogen] out. To do that he prescribed “neutral mixtures, lemonade, cider, peaches, pears and apples.” The trio of Brown, Johnson and Smith maintained their devil may care attitude about the epidemic despite Smith confining himself to bed after getting too much sun on a sail to Long Island to see a patient. They wrote a joint letter to their friend William Dunlap, the painter and theatrical producer who as always in the late summer was in Perth Amboy. Brown joked about “this plaguey fever at our doors, in our cupboards & in our beds.” Johnson marvelled at the fever’s “unaccountable origin,... amazing attributes, and... inexplicable operations,” leaving it to Smith to explain what was going on. From his bed the doctor assured Dunlap that while it was unsafe to be on certain East Side streets, the fever was not as mortal as it was in 1795. One in ten died, “& that not more than one in a hundred would perish, with early attention & faithful nursing.” On the same day Brown wrote to his worried brother in a more serious vein. Smith assured him that not one out of nine died when properly nursed. Brown thought it would be wise to leave if the fever reached their end of town. By becoming sick he would become a burden. However, he knew Smith would never leave. “If I run the risk of requiring to be nursed,” Brown reasoned, “I must not forget that others may require to be nursed by me, in a disease where personal attentions are all in all.” Out at Bellevue, Alexander Anderson was his old sardonic self once again, while he tried to deal with 20 patients, four of whom died on his first day there. With 14 newly admitted patients, Anderson had to fend off “an Irishman who ask’d to
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stay and nurse his sweetheart at night.” He returned to town to see his patients there, and was amused to find that Dr. Chickering had taken the fever. They joked that when he recovered he would “practice without fear.” Unfortunately Anderson was too busy to put much color in his diary. A patient he dismissed as cured came back sick and promptly died; a nurse got sick. Then on the afternoon of September 5, his father came to report that Dr. Chickering had died and Anderson’s brother was sick. Faced with his own brother in a dangerous condition, Anderson lost his confidence. He conferred with Dr. Bayley about a better way to treat patients, but the older doctor seemed “at a loss.” As his brother got worse, his father became ill. On the 8th after going to Bellevue thinking his brother better, he returned to find him dead. As his father got sicker, Anderson sought out Dr. Dingley for consultation. Anderson had bled him twice, and was disappointed when Dingley only prescribed “innocent things.” Anderson saw to it that his father got calomel. On the 10th his father was so ill that Anderson had to resign from Bellevue to spend all his time with him and when able “practic’d among the neighbors many of whom are taken ill.” His father died on September 12. Finding that his mother showed “heroic fortitude,” Anderson went to see his wife on Long Island. To his shock he found her looking ghastly, emaciated and spitting blood. She died the next day. Then he returned to his mother, and was surprised at both her and his own composure. His mother was even lively until the 16th when she was seized with the fever. He gave her medicine immediately and for awhile thought she would recover. A black nurse helped care for her which allowed Anderson to see other patients. His mother became difficult, complaining of being neglected and refusing to take medicine. She died on the morning of the 21st, “delirious all night and suffered much pain.” A few blocks to the west, Elihu Smith and his friends were still sanguine. Smith recovered from his indisposition ascribing “his preservation from death entirely to his vegetable diet” and to not visiting patients when he was sick. Smith sent a long report on the New York epidemic to Rush written very much in the style of the master, a potpourri of incisive generalizations. More natives were getting sick than in 1795, which led to their being fewer deaths because natives, better educated and wealthier, were quicker to get medical attention. He thought the number of sick decreasing and since “the complaint being in great measure local, and the inhabitants of the pestilential district having mostly fled, the extension of the sickness is not greatly to be apprehended.” There was no question of the fever being imported. Even importationists like David Hosack agreed. Few doctors thought the fever contagious and even the general populace agreed. People left “not from fear of the sick, but of the town.” There was no hesitation to nurse a sick friend, “likewise one great cause of the less mortality among us.” As for remedies, alkalies such as soda, potash and lime water invariably relieved victims of “all commotions of the alimentary canal.” Smith asked Rush about his experience with emetics and promised to publish his letter on them in the Medical Repository.
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Like Anderson, Smith was soon humbled by the epidemic. A young Venetian nobleman, Dr. Joseph Scandella, had come to America to broaden his education and took a particular interest in yellow fever. Smith had befriended him, as did a number of men of science including Rush. In August Scandella sailed for Europe from Philadelphia, then the leaky ship returned to New York. Early in the epidemic Scandella joined Smith on his rounds. Then in early September he returned to Philadelphia telling Smith that he went “in search of his baggage.” On September 11, Smith learned that Scandella had returned to New York and was ill with the fever. He rescued him from unfriendly inns, and he, Brown, and Johnson nursed the unlucky Italian. On the 13th Smith wrote to Rush again, reporting that the mortality had increased. He blamed that on the fact that most of those getting sick were poor people who didn’t call for doctors in time. His confidence in Rush’s depleting remedies in combination with alkalies had not diminished. He thought that the alkalies aided the cure by “partially decomposing the calomel and thus diminishing the tendency of this latter medicine to irritate the stomach.” He revealed that Scandella was his patient and closed the letter by assuring Rush that “all that the faculty of New York can do for his relief will be attempted.” Smith noted in his journal that after being very ill, Scandella seemed better. On the 14th he seemed “much better, to all appearance.” On the 15th Smith decided his friend could not recover. On the 16th Smith himself was very ill. The day after the publication of Wieland, his first novel, Charles Brockden Brown, a frail and sickly man, had to share duties with Johnson as they nursed Scandella who lay in Smith’s bed and Smith who lay in a bed in the next room. Before his attack Smith had made a sobering reassessment of the dangers of yellow fever. Distraught at the havoc the fever made in a house where he had six patients, with two so sick they had to be sent to Bellevue where one died, Smith “became sensible of the disproportionate hazard which he incurred, and ... determined, as soon as his friend Scandella had recovered or perished and his present patients had been gotten rid of, to withdraw from town.” The best Brown and Johnson could do, after Scandella died, was to remove Smith to the “spacious, healthfully situated” house of Johnson’s brother Horace. In a letter written the 17th Brown tried to describe how bad it was in New York, how much worse than Philadelphia. A greater proportion of the population died and “the victims to this disease have been in innumerable cases selected from the highest and most respectable class of inhabitants.” On the 18th Brown also seemed to take the fever. Dr. Miller, who along with Smith’s other co-editor, Mitchill, tried to treat Scandella and Smith, took Brown to his own house. In Smith’s case the new alkaline treatment did not work. Nothing could “compose his stomach.” Most of the time he was in a stupor, but when revived he could answer questions rationally. Smith pressed upon his colleagues the importance of inducing salivation. Like Smith, Miller was an old student of Rush’s and followed his prescriptions. Heroic measures failed Smith. Because of his vomiting, calomel would not stay in his system. Mercury rubs
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failed to bring the hoped for soreness and saliva. He revived enough mid-day on the 19th to see that his vomit was black, “pronounced the word ‘decomposition’ and died.” Out at his Perth Amboy retreat William Dunlap had just replied to his jolly friends, inviting Brown and Johnson to come to Perth Amboy and “to Elihu, my apprehensions for his safety & my confidence in his doing his duty.” When he heard of Smith’s imminent death, his usually flinty diary betrayed some emotion: “Notwithstanding my firmest attempts this stroke bears hard upon me.” Just after he learned of Smith’s death, Dr. Rodgers, who weakened by fatigue had left the city, called with the news that Amasa Dingley, with whom Smith had first explored the nature of yellow fever three years before, had died of the disease. Brown recovered, and before he and Johnson came to Amboy, he wrote to Dunlap, “Most ardently do I long to shut out this city from my view....” And to his brother, he wrote the day Smith died: “O the folly of prediction and the vanity of systems.” Drs. Miller and Mitchill did not make a case study of Smith’s death. Miller told Brown that “no case was more dreadful and infinitely malignant.” While lessons were often drawn from their recoveries, the deaths of doctors were seldom detailed. The hazards they faced during an epidemic explained the high mortality in their ranks. Though men like Scandella and Smith, for whose cleanliness, temperance and morality he could vouch lay on the verge of death, Mitchill blamed “the inhabitants [who] have really poisoned their city by the accumulation of excrement, putrid provisions and every unclean thing,” plus their “gross animal diet” and intemperance. “If some of our citizens breathed air as pure and balmy as the breezes of Eden,” Mitchill wrote to Noah Webster on September 17, “they would engender this sickness by their way of life. They would breed it within them. To get the better of these visitations will therefore require more than municipal regulations. An alteration, and a considerable one too, of housekeeping and modes of life will be necessary.” Rush’s reaction to Smith’s death is not known. A letter he wrote to Smith’s parents is not extant. New Yorkers did not dwell on the accumulation of sorrows. With no family to flee to and with friends calling for his services, Anderson resolved to stay until the epidemic ended. He gave up Rush’s mode of practice, began using laudanum and stimulating medicines, and was surprised and gratified by his success. (Once the epidemic did end, he stopped being a doctor and devoted all his energies to engraving. Dr. Young, his first teacher, was surprised at his decision. But as Anderson, who became one of the country’s most beloved engravers, wrote in his memoirs fifty years later, “the succession of calamities” he experienced in 1798 “seemed rather too severe.”) The health committee, the city’s editors, doctors and even citizens in candid private letters continued to think that the crisis was manageable. New Yorkers clung to every healthy block as evidence that it did not have as bad an epidemic as its rival port. Rev. Samuel Miller wrote that he avoided the docks and wharves; a broker wrote that as long as he confined himself between Trinity Church and the upper part of the Battery he felt
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safe. Throughout September the health committee dealt with local nuisances like sewers and bad smells emanating from cellars. Here indeed was a community living and dying by Rush’s principles, although certainly commercial considerations inspired the city’s leaders, more than devotion to the ideas of Rush, Webster and most of the city’s doctors. That brave front was easier to put up because of the headlines that came from Philadelphia. Many ports were stricken but none could rival the misery of Philadelphia. For the first time, banks left the city, prompted not only by sickness and death among employees but by a robbery of the Bank of Pennsylvania on September 2. Two days later the bank moved its offices and valuables to a school house in Germantown. On the 5th the Bank of North America followed. By September 6 the city’s market had moved ten block to the west at Market and Broad Streets. On September 11, James Smith’s store was robbed. A week after that, only the quick shooting of Alderman Robert Wharton, who was supervising the jail after the jailor fled from fear of the fever, prevented an escape by several convicts. The newspapers that spread the stories of the city’s crisis were decimated by the epidemic. Fifty-one men in the printing trade got the fever. The two leaders of the partisan press died; Bache of the Aurora on September 11, and John Fenno, Sr., of the Gazette of the United States on the 16th. Fenno’s wife died on the 6th. (No one made any issue of the medical treatment Bache and Fenno received. Republican though he was, Bache did not take Rush’s cure. A French doctor gave him baths and gentle medicines. That dismayed Bache’s sister who when she visited found the house virtually flooded because the tub leaked. She worried that the damp would harm Mrs. Bache who was in the last days of pregnancy with the family’s fourth child. Perhaps taking a lesson from that, when Bache’s assistant William Duane got the fever he took 212 grains of mercury and though his “gums [were] inflamed, teeth loose and [his] face swelled,” he survived to marry Bache’s widow and carry on the Republican traditions of the Aurora.) The most affecting token of Philadelphia’s despair was the death of Mayor Hillary Baker, who had stayed to relieve the distress of those who remained in the city. “Compared with this dreadful situation,” the New York Daily Advertiser pointed out after describing the devastation of Philadelphia, “the inhabitants of New York have little grounds for murmuring. Large districts and several principal streets have remained almost untouched by the fell destroyer. A great number of rich families have continued in the city, who had ample means of removal. Many gentlemen, particularly the collector and deputy collector, and those belonging to the insurance offices, and various other public departments and branches of business, have been in the constant habit of spending five hours in town every day. The banks have not thought of moving, and not more than four-sevenths of our inhabitants, if that many, have left town.” Only Philadelphia’s rival for political pre-eminence exceeded New York for tasteless commentary during the crisis. A letter from the new city of Washington, where a plunge in real estate prices had crippled development and threatened progress on the
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Capitol which had to be ready for Congress in 1800, extolled the site of the new capital. It was “remarkable for the salubrity of its air, the purity of its water, and the cheapness of provisions and fuel; and that whilst the yellow fever stalks with desolating strides in some of the principal towns of the Union, the Federal City, destined at some future day to rival the glory of ancient Rome, bids fair to be secure from this ravager of cities, and to enjoy from its peculiar situation and construction an envious scene of health.” Most in the nation did not indulge in making invidious distinctions as the sickly season progressed because no place seemed safe from yellow fever. In late September the fever flared up again in Boston causing a new panic. A new arrival at a suburban refuge reported on the 24th that “the number of new cases was 40, many dead and a dying, greatly beyond any preceding time and the people preparing to remove and that the doctors now call the disorder the Plague.” Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Wilmington, Delaware, began providing counts of fever cases and deaths. In the northern port only a handful were victims. Between August 7 and September 23, Wilmington counted 127 dead, all but 8 of those adults. On the 23rd alone 10 died. Chester, Pennsylvania, then a small village, also reported deaths. New London, Connecticut, was also hit by yellow fever. Congressman Joshua Coit was one of its victims. A September 9 letter from nearby Norwich reported that based on the proportion of victims to New London’s population, the epidemic was “greater... than has ever been experienced on our continent.” The city was nearly deserted and yet people still died. “The skill of our physicians though many of them are eminent in their profession, appears to be wholly baffled with this fever; and there seems no other security but flight.” In a September 20 letter to his brother, William Russell, a Boston merchant, contemplated “the dreadful calamity with which this country is now visited in each of the commercial cities to a degree beyond all former precedents. Distressing and alarming as it has been upon former occasions it is far more so upon this and the direful consequences have attained an excess which has spread alarm through the whole continent.” Alice Cogswell who was recovering from a cancer operation in Princeton might have been expected to ignore the epidemics in light of her own troubles. Her brother in New York had fled in time, and her brother who was a doctor was out of harm’s way in Hartford. But the epidemic served as a metaphor for her own insecurity: “What sad havoc does this pestilential fever make with the inhabitants of this world, wives torn from their husbands, husbands torn from their wives, and in some instances whole families swept to eternity without one relict left to mourn their loss. It is enough to make ones heart weep drops of blood, or rather streams, my soul turns with horror from this scene of wretchedness and misery to the world beyond the grave where there is no more sorrow or grief. It is the god of heaven that thus desolates the world and he has just reason for it....”
Summer/Fall: There was an epidemic of the yellow fever in Boston.
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1799
December: Noah Webster, Jr.’s BRIEF HISTORY OF EPIDEMIC AND PESTILENTIAL DISEASES.
The General Greene, having seen service in the West Indies, sailed back into its home port of Newport, Rhode Island, bringing with it the yellow fever. Aboard this vessel in this year, Midshipman Oliver Hazard Perry survived two bouts of the yellow fever. During this year there would be another outbreak of the yellow fever
in Philadelphia — and Dr. Benjamin Rush would be forming the medical opinion that this disease was not contagious. Various methods and places of separating out foreigners and infected beings had been devised in 1793 in Philadelphia, and then with each annual recurrence. Temporary hospitals and treatments facilities had been thrown up. Places of isolating both the sick and new arrivals had been established. No ships arriving from the tropics had been being allowed into the port of Philadelphia without the examination of passengers by appointed physicians and the quarantining of any suspected of illness. Calls from all quarters for an isolation facility had led by this year to the design and construction of “The Lazaretto” eight miles to the south. This new structure was designed by physicians, public health officials, and government agencies to serve as the point of arrival for all ships, passengers, and immigrants. It included docks, grounds, dormitories, a hospital, and treatment facilities to handle hundreds of arriving passengers at a time. All passengers were detained at
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least temporarily, those suspected of infection were quarantined, and those determined to be ill were treated in accordance with the limited understanding available at the time. The thousands who died from infections would be buried on site. The Lazaretto as it was completed in this year included a building that resembled very much Independence Hall in Philadelphia. It included a compound of additional buildings and facilities that could handle the immigration or expulsion of all new arrivals in the port. (The Lazaretto would operate quietly and efficiently as Philadelphia’s version of Ellis Island from this point until the end of the 19th Century. In the early 20th Century the facility would become the headquarters of the Philadelphia Sea Plane Base — one of the first sea plane facilities in the United States. Later in the 20th Century the compound would also be used as popular marina. The Lazaretto is on the Delaware River just a few miles south of Philadelphia International Airport.)
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AN ACCOUNT
OF THE
BILIOUS YELLOW FEVER,
AS IT
APPEARED IN PHILADELPHIA,
IN THE YEAR 1799
BY BENJAMIN RUSH
The diseases which succeeded the fever of 1798, in November and December, were highly inflammatory. A catarrh was nearly universal. Several cases of sore throat, and one of erysipelas, came under my care in the month of November. The weather in December was extremely cold. It was equally so in the beginning of January, 1799, accompanied with several falls of snow. About the middle of the month, the weather moderated so much, so as to open the navigation of the Delaware. I met with two cases of malignant colic in the latter part of this month, and one of yellow fever. The last was Swen Warner. Dr. Physick, who attended him with me, informed me that he had, nearly at the same time, attended two other persons with the same disease. The weather was very cold, and bilious pleurisies were common, during the later part of the month of February. March was equally cold. The newspapers contained accounts of the winter having been uncommonly severe in Canada, and in several European countries. The first two weeks in April were still cold. The Delaware, which had been frozen a second time during the winter, was crossed near its origin, on the ice, on the 15th day of this month. The diseases, though fewer than in the winter, were bilious and inflammatory. During this month, I was called to a case of yellow fever, which yielded to copious bleeding, and other depleting medicines. May was colder than is usual in that month, but very healthy. In the first week of June, several cases of highly bilious fever came under my care. In one of them, all the usual symptoms of the highest grade of that fever occurred. On the 13th of the month, Dr. Physick informed me, that he had lost a patient with that disease. On the 23d of the same month, Joseph Ashmead, a young merchant, died of it. Several other cases of the disease occurred between the 20th and 29th days of the month, in
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different parts of the city. About this time, I was informed that the inhabitants of Keys’s-alley had predicted a return of the yellow fever, from the trees before their doors emitting a smell, exactly the same which they perceived just before the breaking out of that disease in 1793. In July, the city was alarmed, by Dr. Griffitts, with an account of several cases of the fever in Penn-street, near the water. The strictness with which the quarantine law had been executed, for a while rendered this account incredible with many people and exposed the doctor to a good deal of obloquy. At length a vessel was discovered, that had arrived from one of the West- India islands on the 14th of May, and one day before the quarantine law was put into operation, from which the disease was said to be derived. Upon investigating the state of this vessel, it appeared that she had arrived with a healthy crew, and that no person had been sick on board of her during her voyage. In the latter part of July and in the beginning of August, the disease gradually disappeared from every part of the city. This circumstance deserves attention, as it shows the disease did not spread by contagion. About this time we were informed by the news-papers, that dogs, geese, and other poultry, also that wild pigeons were sickly in many parts of the country, and that fish on the Susquehannah, and oysters in the Delaware bay, were so unpleasant that the inhabitants declined eating them. At the same time, flies were found dead in great numbers, in the unhealthy parts of the city. The weather was dry in August and September. There was no second crop of grass. The gardens yielded a scanty supply of vegetables, and of an inferior size and quality. Cherries were smaller than usual, and pear and apple-trees dropped their fruits prematurely, in large quantities. The peaches, which arrived at maturity, were small and ill tasted. The grain was in general abundant, and of a good quality. A fly, of an unusual kind, covered the potatoe fields, and devoured in some instances, the leaves of the potatoe. This fly has lately been used with success in our country, instead of the fly imported from Spain. It is equal to it in every respect. Like the Spanish fly, it sometimes induces strangury. About the middle of August the disease revived, and appeared in different parts of the city. A publication from the academy of medicine, in which they declared the seeds of the disease to spread from the atmosphere only, produced a sudden flight of the inhabitants. In no year, since the prevalence of the fever, was the desertion of the city so general. I shall now add a short account to the symptoms and treatment of this epidemic. The arterial system was in most cases active. I met with a tense pulse in a patient after the appearance of the black vomiting. Delirium was less frequent in adults than in former years. In children there was a great determination of the disease to the brain. I observed no new symptoms in the stomach and bowels. One of the worst cases of the fever which I saw was accompanied with colic. A girl of Thomas Shortall, who recovered, discharged nine worms
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during her fever. It appeared in Mr. Thomas Roane, one of my pupils, in the form of a dysentery. A stiffness, such as follows death, occurred in several patients in the city hospital before death. Miss Shortall had an eruption of pimples on her breast, such as I have described in the short account I gave of the yellow fever of 1762 in this city, in my account of the disease of 1793. The blood exhibited its usual appearances in the yellow fever. It was seldom sizy till toward the close of the disease. The tongue was generally whitish. Sometimes it was of a red colour, and had a polished appearance. I saw no case of a black tongue; and but few that were yellow before the seventh day of the disease. The type of this disease was nearly the same as described in 1797. It now and then appeared in the form of a quartan, in which state it generally proved fatal. It appeared with rheumatic pains in one of my patients. It blended itself with gout and small-pox. Its union with the latter disease was evident in two patients in the city hospital, in each of whom the stools were such as were discharged in the most malignant state of the fever. The remedies for this fever were bleeding, vomits, purges, sweats, and a salivation and blisters. There were few cases that did not indicate bleeding. It was performed, when proper, in the usual way, and with its usual good effects. It was indicated as much when the disease appeared in the bowels as in the blood-vessels. Mr. Roane, in whom it was accompanied with symptoms of dysentery, lost nearly 200 ounces of blood by twenty-two bleedings. Purges of calomel and jalap, also castor oil, salts, and injections were prescribed with their usual advantages. In those cases where the system was prostrated below the point of re-action, I began the cure by sweating. Blankets, with hot bricks wetted with vinegar, and the hot bath, as mentioned formerly, when practicable, were used for this purpose. The latter produced, in a boy of 14 years of age, who came into the city hospital without a pulse, and with a cold skin, in a few hours, a general warmth and an active pulse. The determination of the disease to the pores was evinced in one of my patients, by her sweating under the use of the above-mentioned remedies, for the first time in her life. A moisture upon her skin had never before been induced, she informed me, even by the warmest day in summer. The advantages of a salivation were as great as in former years. From the efficacy of bleeding, purges, emetics, and sweating, I had the pleasure of seeing many recoveries before the mercury had time to affect the mouth. In no one case did I rest the cure exclusively upon any one of these remedies. The more numerous the outlets were to convey off superfluous fluids and excitement from the body, the more safe and certain were the recoveries. A vein, the gall-bladder, the bowels, the pores, and the salivary glands were all opened, in succession, in part, or together, according to circumstances, so as to give the disease every possible chance of passing out of the body without injuring or destroying any of its vital parts. Blisters were applied with advantage. The vomiting and sickness
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which attend this fever were relieved in many instances, by a blister to the stomach. In those cases in which the fever was protracted to the chronic state, bark, wine, laudanum, and aether produced the most salutary effects. I think I saw life recalled, in several cases in which it appeared to be departing, by frequent and liberal doses of the last of those medicines. The bark was given, with safety and advantage. after the seventh day, when the fever assumed the form of an intermittent. The following symptoms were generally favourable, viz. a bleeding from the mouth and gums, and a disposition to weep, when spoken to in any stage of the fever. A hoarseness and sore throat indicated a fatal issue of the disease, as it did in 1798. Dr. Physick remarked, that all those persons who sighed after waking suddenly, before they were able to speak, died. The recurrence of a redness of the eyes, after it had disappeared, or of but one eye, was generally followed by death. I saw but one recovery with a red face. I saw several persons, a few hours before death, in whom the countenance, tongue, voice, and pulse were perfectly natural. They complained of no pain, and discovered no distress nor solicitude of mind. Their danger was only to be known by the circumstances which had preceded this apparently healthy and tranquil state of the system. They had all passed through extreme suffering, and some of them had puked black matter. The success of the mode of practice I have described was the same as in former years, in private families; but in the city hospital, which was again placed under the care of Dr. Physick and myself, there was a very different issue to it, from causes that are too obvious to be mentioned. There were two opinions given to the public upon the subject of the origin of this fever; the one by the academy of medicine, the other by the college of physicians. The former declared it to be generated in the city, from putrid domestic exhalations, because they saw it only in their vicinity, and discovered no channel by which it could have been derived from a foreign country; the latter asserted it to be “imported, because it had been imported in former years.”
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19TH CENTURY
1800
Summer: According to an 1878 source, THE NARRAGANSETT HISTORICAL REGISTER, A MAGAZINE DEVOTED TO THE ANTIQUITIES, GENEALOGY AND HISTORICAL MATTER ILLUSTRATING THE HISTORY OF THE STATE OF RHODE ISLAND AND PROVIDENCE PLANTATIONS, James N. Arnold, Editor, Volume III, issued by the Narragansett Historical Publishing Company of Hamilton and printed at E.L. Freeman & Co., Printers, of Central Falls, pages 136-138, there was during the summer of this year a yellow fever epidemic in Providence, Rhode Island (it was the one mentioned by Thomas Jefferson in his letter of September 23d to Dr. Benjamin Rush, that struck also in Baltimore, Maryland and in Norfolk, Virginia): Dr. E.M. Snow, in an elaborate article printed in the Providence Journal in June, 1857, and re-printed in the Journal of September 23d, 1878, after detailing incidents connected with the prevalence of the disease in 1779, at which time there were 36 deaths reported, most of which occurred at the south end of the town and all south of Williams street, goes on to say that “in the summer of the year 1800 the yellow fever seemed to be confidently expected in Providence, and an order was issued by the Town Council respecting the removal of nuisances on the 12th of May. As early as the 22d of June a vessel arrived from Jamaica with cases of yellow fever on board, which were sent to the hospital. Other infected vessels arrive in June and July, but no case occurred among the inhabitants until the 15th of August. The first case was a Mrs. Taylor, who lived on the west side of Wickenden street, a little north of the present location of the Providence Tool Company. She died on the 20th of August.” An old paper found among the effects of Joel Metcalf, Esq., who died November 26th, 1834, and who was a member of the Town Council in the year 1800, contains a list of the names of those who were attacked by the disease, noting the date of attack, date of removal to the hospital of those who were sent there, and date of the death of those who did not recover, which is here
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presented.4
Mrs. Taylor died August 21
Elizabeth Whiting recovered
Joseph Tillinghast(son of John) died August 22
Mrs. Luther died August 21
Joseph Cooke recovered
Mrs. Earle died August 23
Sweet Luther recovered
Miss Dunn (a child) recovered
Miss Warner recovered
Patrick Morriss died August 23
Jeremiah B. Howell recovered
Rebekah Carr died August 23
Jonathan Eddy died August 25
Jeremiah Whiting recovered
Mrs. Atkins recovered
Charles Tillinghast recovered
Wife of Charles Tillinghast died August 26
Nancy Briggs recovered
Richard Hinman died August 25
Lucretia Pearce died August 26
Mrs. Bogman died September 1
Mary Whiting recovered
Patrick Greatrix recovered
Jos. Arnold died August 31
Thos. Mitchell recovered
Mrs. Bird recovered
Amey Read died September 1
Lucy Libby recovered
Hannah Fuller (wife of John) recovered
Mrs. Newell recovered
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Mrs. Sheldon (wife of John) died September 7
Betsey Stokes died September 11
Prince Burrill died September 12
wife of Prince Burrill recovered
Ruth Curtis died September 11
Mrs. Warner (wife of John) died September 10
Stephen Ashton died September 8
Amey Tillinghast recovered
Mrs. Warner (wife of Samuel) died Sep. 13
Nancy Blinn recovered
Edward Luther died September 12
Edward Dickens died September 15
Phebe Hull died September 13
Mrs. Dickens died September 16
William Olney (son of David) recovered
Mrs. Pearce died September 17
Mrs. Dickens (widow) died September 14
Sally Hull died September 17
Polly Godfrey died September 20
Eliza Dickens recovered
Moses (negro) recovered
Mary Tillinghast died September 17
Sarah Gibbs (negro) recovered
Mary Fields died September 20
Child of E. Congdon died September 21
Child of E. Congdon died September 23
Mrs. Brown (widow) died September 19
James Temple died September 19
Daniel Bucklin recovered
Ephraim Congdon recovered
Mrs. Mitchel died September 20
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Sally Howe recovered
Jabez Bucklin died September 26
Provy Brown’s wife died September 19
Mrs. Davis (wife of John) died September 23
John Stokes died September 21
Lydia Eveleth died September 22
Betsey Huntington recovered
Rebecca Luther died October 1
Amey Godfrey died September 27
John Warner died September 26
Mary Stokes recovered
Mrs. Tillinghast (wife of John) died September 26
Nancy Newfield died September 27
Violet Cook died September 28
John Sheldon died September 27
Daniel Pearce died September 25
Sally Waters died September 28
Nancy Waters recovered
Phebe Sisco recovered
Mrs. Congdon recovered
Henry Faulkman recovered
Joshua Harding died October ——
Piney ———— recovered
Thomas Savin died September 26
Joshua Penneman (?) died October 20
Number of deaths 52 Sick at hospital 37 Died at Hospital 18 Recoveries 34 of the 86 listed
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September 23, day: Thomas Jefferson wrote to Dr. Benjamin Rush, the Treasurer of the US Mint, from Monticello.
We note that in this letter the President –who is currently being honored by some vocal members of our “Moral Majority” political grouping as one of the Christian founders of our Christian nation– neglected to capitalize the name of God: Dear Sir, — I have to acknolege the receipt of your favor of Aug. 22, and to congratulate you on the healthiness of your city. Still Baltimore, Norfolk [Virginia] & Providence [Rhode Island] admonish us that we are not clear of our new scourge. When great evils happen, I am in the habit of looking out for what good may arise from them as consolations to us, and Providence has in fact so established the order of things, as that most evils are the means of producing some good. The yellow fever will discourage the growth of great cities in our nation, & I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts, but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere, and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue & freedom, would be my choice. I agree with you entirely, in condemning the mania of giving names to objects of any kind after persons still living. Death alone can seal the title of any man to this honor, by putting it out of his power to forfeit it. There is one other mode of recording merit, which I have often thought might be introduced, so as to gratify the living by praising the dead. In giving, for instance, a commission of chief justice to Bushrod Washington, it should be in consideration of his integrity, and science in the laws. and of the services rendered to our country by his illustrious relation, &c. A commission to a descendant of Dr. Franklin, besides being in consideration of the proper qualifications of the person, should add that of the great services rendered by his illustrious ancestor, Bn Fr, by the advancement of science, by inventions useful to man, &c. I am not sure that we ought to change all our names. And during the regal government, sometimes, indeed, they were given through adulation; but often also as the reward of the merit of the times, sometimes for services rendered the colony. Perhaps, too, a name when given, should be deemed a sacred property. I promised you a letter on Christianity, which I have not forgotten. On the contrary, it is because I have reflected on it, that I find much more time necessary for it than I can at present dispose of. I have a view of the subject which ought to displease neither the rational Christian nor Deists, and would
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reconcile many to a character they have too hastily rejected. I do not know that it would reconcile the genus irritabile vatum who are all in arms against me. Their hostility is on too interesting ground to be softened. The delusion into which the X.Y.Z. plot shewed it possible to push the people; the successful experiment made under the prevalence of that delusion on the clause of the constitution, which, while it secured the freedom of the press, covered also the freedom of religion, had given to the clergy a very favorite hope of obtaining an establishment of a particular form of Christianity thro’ the U.S.; and as every sect believes its own form the true one, every one perhaps hoped for his own, but especially the Episcopalians & Congregationalists. The returning good sense of our country threatens abortion to their hopes, & they believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from me: & enough too in their opinion, & this is the cause of their printing lying pamphlets against me, forging conversations for me with Mazzei, Bishop Madison, &c., which are absolute falsehoods without a circumstance of truth to rest on; falsehoods, too, of which I acquit Mazzei & Bishop Madison, for they are men of truth.
But enough of this: it is more than I have before committed to paper on the subject of all the lies that has been preached and printed against me. I have not seen the work of Sonnoni which you mention, but I have seen another work on Africa, (Parke’s,) which I fear will throw cold water on the hopes of the friends of freedom. You will hear an account of an attempt at insurrection in this state. I am looking with anxiety to see what will be it’s effect on our state. We are truly to be pitied. I fear we have little chance to see you at the Federal city or in Virginia, and as little at Philadelphia. It would be a great treat to receive you here. But nothing but sickness could effect that; so I do not wish it. For I wish you health and happiness, and think of you with affection. Adieu.
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Noting that nowadays, on the marble walls of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC, appears a carved panel proclaiming Thomas Jefferson’s boast to have been “I have sworn eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man” –silently eliding the problematic phrase “upon the altar of god”– James W. Loewen has commented, on page 142 of his LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME: EVERYTHING YOUR AMERICAN HISTORY TEXTBOOK GOT WRONG (NY: New Press, 1995), “Perhaps asking a marble memorial to tell the truth is demanding too much.”
The same quote now appears on the right front door of a Unitarian Universalist church, with the problematic Jeffersonian lack of capitalization of “god” suppressed through the utilization of all-caps lettering:
Please consider: leaving aside the issue of what Jefferson meant by “upon the altar of god” –whether by “god” he meant what we mean by sincerely “before God,” or meant something less than that, perhaps fulsomely “upon the altars of the gods”– was it true, or was it false, that this man was hostile to every form of tyranny over the mind of man? This is a gentleman who had some little children scampering about his estate who were perhaps 1/16th black, perhaps 1/32nd black, who was refusing to provide a proper education for these children of his own loins. —Is it not a form of tyranny over the mind, to keep it in the dark in such a manner?
I think it is! Such a man is not to be credited, in his fulsome pronouncements, to any greater extent than we would credit the fulsome pronouncements of any other deadbeat dad.
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All this Virginia slavemaster meant was “Nobody gets to fuck with my mind.” What this Virginia slavemaster did not mean was “I’m going to refrain from fucking with other people’s minds.”
(The reference in Jefferson’s letter to a writing that would “throw cold water on the hopes of the friends of freedom” was to Mungo Park’s 1795 TRAVELS IN THE INTERIOR DISTRICTS OF AFRICA: PERFORMED UNDER THE DIRECTION AND PATRONAGE OF THE AFRICAN ASSOCIATION, IN THE YEARS 1795, 1796, AND 1797.... Jefferson frequently misspelled names. The London edition of the Scottish explorer’s account of his journey up the Niger River appears to be that of W. Bulmer and Co. in 1799, though it may have appeared first in 1797. It was published in Philadelphia in 1800.)
1801
The city of Philadelphia completed its water system, the 1st in a major US city. The Central Square Waterworks began to supply the city of Philadelphia with piped drinking water from the Schuylkill River, by means of steam-powered pumps. In part, the people there were hoping against hope that this sort of general multipurpose cleanup would act against further outbreaks of disease, such as yellow fever which had been devastating the population.
(However, until its Fairmount Waterworks would go on line in 1815, the main pressure in Philadelphia would not be adequate to generate a fire-quenching jet of water out of a fire hose nozzle.)
1802
Another outbreak of the yellow fever in Philadelphia.
August 4: In France, the Constitution of the Year X went into effect. Napoléon became Consul for Life with the right to appoint his own successor.
The Philadelphia Gazette reprinted a letter which had appeared in the American Daily Advertiser, containing a prescient conjecture that the yellow fever might be being caused by an insect: Mr. Poulson, Reading your extract from “Recollections relative to Egypt,” published this morning, has induced me to communicate the result of some enquiries I made some time since concerning the yellow fever, plague, &c. I have long been of the opinion those diseases were produced by minute insects depositing their eggs in the pores of the human body, and that the critical days were occasioned by the changes of the insect from the egg to
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the maggot, from the maggot to the torpid crisalis, and from thence to the fly, at which time it deserts the body leaving its shell, which must be thrown out by perfuse perspiration or death will ensue; warm baths are known to be of great service by (perhaps) assisting nature in discharging the cause of the disease: As I am but an observer of nature it is not necessary to enter further into the subject — neither is it at this critical moment necessary to dispute upon the cause from whence springs this evil so justly dreaded by our citizens — whether from gases or the “living cloud of pestilence,” already have I said enough to bring upon me a living cloud of diplomatic gentlemen. FACTS. Not a butcher or butcher’s boy has had a louse in their heads, or any other species of insects on their bodies since they attended the markets regularly! During the last fever, not one butcher died who attended market constant! The lamplighters have not been infected with any kind of vermin, since they commenced that oily occupation! Not a single lamplighter died during the last fever, although exposed to the night air, and particularly to the disease! whereas, nearly all the silent watch were taken off. I believe it is currently known, that none of the oil or colour men died in London during the plague. What are we to infer from the foregoing? that oil is a preventative, and perhaps a cure. Insects breath throught their sides, consequently a small quantity of oil destroys them. In the holy scriptures we notice the practice of anointing with oils, and those countries were subject to malignant diseases, occasioned by a superabundance of animal life. “Oils were poured into the wounds of the afflicted” witness the Samaritan; religious customs were established by a wise administration, for useful purposes, and I have not the least doubt but this was one. What is the principle ingredient in all our salves? is it not oil? Butter will immediately remove warts. I therefore would recommend constant use of olive oil at our tables, bathe frequently and annointing with this inoffensive substance, the superabundance may be wiped off with a coarse towel, this mode will not be disagreeable or expensive, cannot do any injury, may prevent and possibly even cure the disease. Is it not worthy of some tryals? ANIMALCULE
Fall: By this point President Thomas Jefferson had become aware that the army the French had sent to subdue the island of Haiti had succumbed to the yellow fever, and that the army the French had intended for the Louisiana territory had been redirected toward that island.
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1803
Another outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia.
1805
Another outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia.
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1808
April: Word was received in Salem that Captain Nathaniel Hathorne of the Maria Louisa had died of yellow fever in Surinam, Dutch Guyana. Before he was four years of age, Nathaniel Hathorne was informed that his father was no more. The widowed Mrs. Elizabeth Manning Hathorne and her children would move into her parents’ home, and would henceforth be dependent upon the Mannings. According to his son Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s upbringing would involve “what might be considered special
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disadvantages”:
His mother, a woman of fine gifts but of extreme sensibility, lost her husband in her twenty-eighth year; and, from an exaggerated, almost Hindoo-like construction of the law of seclusion which the public taste of that day imposed upon widows, she withdrew entirely from society, and permitted the habit of solitude to grow upon her to such a degree that she actually remained a strict hermit to the end of her long life, or for more than forty years after Captain Hathorne’s death. Such behavior on the mother’s part could not fail to have its effect on the children. They had no opportunity to know what social intercourse meant; their peculiarities and eccentricities were at least negatively encouraged; they grew to regard themselves as something apart from the general world. It is saying much for the sanity and healthfulness of the minds of these three children, that their loneliness distorted their judgment, their perception of the relations of things, so little as it did. Elizabeth, the eldest, had, indeed, an understanding in many respects as commanding and penetrating as that of her famous brother; a cold, clear, dispassionate common-sense, softened by a touch of humor such as few women possess. “The only thing I fear,” her brother said once, “is the ridicule of Elizabeth.” As for Louisa, the youngest of the three, she was more commonplace than any of them; a pleasant, refined, sensible, feminine personage. with considerable innate sociability of temperament. Nathaniel, two years younger than Elizabeth and four years older than Louisa, had the advantage, in the first place, of being a boy. He could go out in the streets, play with other boys, fight with them. make friends with them. He was distinguished by a cool and discriminating judgment, with a perception of the ludicrous which, especially in his earlier years, manifested itself in a disposition to satire. Being more than a match, intellectually, for the boys of his own age with whom he came in contact, he had a certain ascendency over them, which could be enforced, at need, by his personal strength and pugnacity. He was daring, but never reckless; he did not confound courage with foolhardiness. These characteristics could hardly have failed to inspire in him a fair degree of self-complacency, which would probably continue until the deeper thoughts which succeed those of boyhood made him look more broadly, and therefore more humbly, upon the relations of things and men. But, at all events, he had a better chance than his sisters to escape from the pensive gloom of his mother’s mode of existence into the daylight and breeze of common life.
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Her solitary habits, however, affected and stimulated his imagination, which was further nourished by the tales of the War of 1812 and of the Revolution related to him by his elders, and by the traditions of the witchcraft period, — in all of which episodes his own forefathers had borne a part; and his mother, who, in spite of her unworldliness, had some wise views as to education, gave him books to read of romance, poetry, and allegory, which largely aided to develop the ideal side of his mind. Too much weight can hardly be given to the value of this imaginative training in a boy who united a high and sensitive organization to robust bodily powers. It provided him with a world apart from the material world, in which he could find employment and exercise for all those vague energies and speculations of an active and investigating temperament, which has not yet acquired the knowledge and experience necessary to a discrimination between the sound and the unsound. If all imaginative resources had been closed to him, the impulse to live throughout the range of his capacities would doubtless have led him into mischief which could not afterwards have been repaired. Such, slightly indicated, were some of the conditions under which Nathaniel Hawthorne began to live.
1815
At this point the water-works at Fairmount, begun in 1812 to supply Philadelphia with water, were complete. As far back as 1764, after the yellow fever had struck the city, Benjamin Franklin had advocated the necessity of supplying the city with adequate clean water, and in his will of June 23, 1789, had recommended that the city make an appropriation for that purpose. In 1797 water had been brought from Spring Mill Creek and from the Schuylkill by steam power, to be stored in tanks ready for use, but in 1812 these more efficient gravity-flow works had also been undertaken. With the turning on of the Fairmount Waterworks, enough pressure became available to the water system of the city of Philadelphia that it would be able to attach fire hoses directly to its hydrants in order to produce fire- quenching streams of water (New-York would not achieve this level of water main pressure until its Croton Reservoir opened in 1842 and Boston would not achieve this until 1848).
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1819
August 23, Monday: Captain Oliver Hazard Perry, sent with the USS John Adams to Venezuela on a diplomatic mission, died at sea of the yellow fever, and would temporarily be interred at Port of Spain, Trinidad. (In 1826 his remains would be removed with great pomp and ceremony to Newport, Rhode Island.)
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October 2, Saturday: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley moved to Firenze.
Alfred Hawkins got married with a Martha Peterson or Patterson at the Anglican Cathedral of Québec. The gazette for October 13th would report: “Married, at Québec on Saturday evening 2nd instant, by the Rev. G.J. Mountain, Mr. Alfred Hawkins, wine merchant, to Miss Patterson, daughter of Mr. James Patterson, of the same place.”
The nation was learning that Commodore Oliver Hazard “We Have Met The Enemy And They Are Ours” Perry, hero of the War of 1812, had in Venezuela succumbed to the yellow fever:
OLIVER HAZARD PERRY
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7th day 2nd of 10 M 1819 / This Afternoon Attended the funeral
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of My Cousin Ruth Marsh, she departed this life last evening about a quarter past 8 OClock. I returned to the House & took tea with the family she being the last of her generation, & to take my leave of a house where I took much pleasure & derived much benefit in my youth from the proffitable conversation of her Sister Mary & Brother Jonathon. The estate will be divided into so many divisions that it is Probable it will now soon go out of the name & the house so old that it must be Pulled down. — from the best information I can obtain the Marsh House on the east side of Thames Street was built by Walter Clarke & given to one of his daughters who married a Gould & their daughter Mary Married Jonathon Marsh the father of Ruth aforementioned & has been regularly inhabited by Friends to the present day & she is the last of our society that will probably have any claim to it. —- The fashon & all things in this World change. - while sitting in the Room at the funeral my mind was lead into a very serious train of reflection, on the many changes I had seen in that House & now it seemed as if the final change had come to it. — May I proffit by the feelings which I experienced while commemorating the past hours spent with the past inhabitants of that house, & I am Sure I felt much more that I have here conveyed. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
1820
February 11, Friday: Captain George Soule of Duxbury, Massachusetts died of the yellow fever and the body was consigned to the sea off the isle of St. Thomas in the West Indies (this would not be the George Soule who was a servant of Edward Winslow and a signer of the Mayflower Compact, but presumably one of his descendants).
May: Three deaths from yellow fever were recorded in Savannah.
June: Fourteen additional deaths from yellow fever were recorded in Savannah, Georgia.
July: Thirty-nine additional deaths from yellow fever were recorded in Savannah.
August: One hundred and eleven additional deaths from yellow fever were recorded in Savannah.
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September 20, Wednesday: Red-haired but nearly bald Colonel Josiah “The Prairie Chicken” Snelling laid the cornerstone of a massive new fort, to be called “Fort St. Anthony,” at the confluence of the Mississippi River and the St. Peter’s River overlooking Pike Island in what eventually would become Minnesota. Construction would require six years.
Rochesterville, New York’s Methodist Episcopal Church opened and Abelard Reynolds was named 1st trustee.
Two hundred and forty-one additional deaths from yellow fever were recorded in Savannah.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 21 of 9 M / Our meeting today was small & silent to me a season of some oppression. — John remains very poorly. I hardly know what to think of his case. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
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October: Two hundred and sixty-three additional deaths from yellow fever were recorded in Savannah. In all, a 10th of the city’s population, 666 citizens died from yellow fever — a decimation. An estimated 70% of those who survived had done so by fleeing the city. Except for clergy and physicians, the streets were often deserted. Barrels of tar burned daily throughout the city in the typical useless but pungent attempt to purify the air. Dr. William R. Waring wrote that “The scene of sickness, misery and ruin was awful, shocking and well-fitted to inspire a melancholy sentiment of the shortness, uncertainty and insignificance of life.”
1829
The Reverend Abiel Abbot’s posthumous LETTERS WRITTEN IN THE INTERIOR OF CUBA, BETWEEN THE MOUNTAINS OF ARCANA, TO THE EAST, AND CUSCO, TO THE WEST, IN THE MONTHS OF FEBRUARY, MARCH, 5 APRIL, AND MAY, OF 1828 (Boston, 1829).
1834
In his search for a way to combat the yellow fever and benefit his patients, Dr. John Goorie suspended buckets of ice in front of fans and directed cool air at his patients by means of ducts. (Air conditioning by means of electricity would not come along until 1902, and would then initially be developed because Willis Carrier needed to prevent printing-press jams and product losses due to the physical changes of paper under heat and humidity.)
1837
Elihu Burritt moved to Worcester in order to use the grammars and lexicons at the American Antiquarian Society.
Elijah Hinsdale Burritt organized and led a party of 30 colonists, which included his sister Emily Burritt and his brother William Burritt, to Houston, Texas. From Emily’s diary we learn the details of the disaster that this would become. First the ship would require a voyage of 28 days to get them to Galveston, then there would be a storm and a shipwreck, then when they finally arrived at Houston they found that the preparations for their arrival had been inadequate and they would need to live in tents, then there would be a yellow fever epidemic that would carry away most of the colonists. Elijah Hinsdale Burritt and William Burritt would be among the fatalities.
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1838
January 3: Enoch Cobb Wines wrote from St. Louis to the President of Brown University, the Reverend Doctor Barnas Sears (1802-1880, Class of 1825).
In the evening, before a lecture at the Salem Lyceum, Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody introduced Jones Very to Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Elijah Hinsdale Burritt died of the yellow fever, not yet 44 years of age.
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1843
In an epidemic of yellow fever in the Mississippi Valley, some 13,000 would perish. (Everybody knew at that time that this yellow fever had something to do with the swamp, but at the time it was being assumed that this was something having to do with fetid air.)
Jean-Nicolas Nicollet, in REPORT INTENDED TO ILLUSTRATE A MAP OF THE HYDROGRAPHICAL BASIN OF THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI RIVER (Washington: Blair and Rives; also published in 1845 as EX. DOC. NO. 52, HO. REPS. 2D SESS. 28TH CONGR.), commented on the issue of whether Baron Lahontan ever saw a “Long River,”
and suggested that his report had been of the Cannon River that enters the Mississippi River near the head of Lake Pepin, supposing that this stream was then an outlet of the Minnesota River: “Having procured a copy of Lahontan’s book, in which is a roughly made map of his Long River, I was struck with the remembrance of its course as laid down with that of the Cannon River, which I had previously sketched. I soon convinced myself that the principal statements of the Baron, and the few details he gives of the physical character of the river, coincide remarkably with what I had found as belonging to the Cannon River. Thus the lakes and swamps corresponded, and traces of Indian villages mentioned by him might be found in the growth of a wild grass that propagates itself around all old Indian settlements. His account of the mouth of the river is particularly accurate: ‘We entered the mouth of Long River, a sort of lake almost covered with bulrushes, — I say almost, for there was exactly in its middle a small channel which we followed till evening.’” JEAN-NICOLAS NICOLLET
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1849
Birth of Sarah Alice Nott.
One of the names being used for the dreaded yellow fever was the black vomit, because it was causing its victims to vomit black blood. As an example of this usage, in this year Herman Melville was writing, in his REDBURN, HIS FIRST VOYAGE, BEING THE SAILOR-BOY CONFESSIONS AND REMINISCENCES OF THE SON-OF- A-GENTLEMAN, IN THE MERCHANT SERVICE:
REDBURN: No more did we think of the gale and the plague; nor turn our eyes upward to the stains of blood, still visible on the topsail, whence Jackson had fallen; but we fixed our gaze on the orchards and meads, and like thirsty men, drank in all their dew. On the Staten Island side, a white staff displayed a pale yellow flag, denoting the habitation of the quarantine officer; for as if to symbolize the yellow fever itself, and strike a panic and premonition of the black vomit into every beholder, all quarantines all over the world, taint the air with the streamings of their fever-flag. But though the long rows of white-washed hospitals on the hill side were now in plain sight, and though scores of ships were here lying at anchor, yet no boat came off to us; and to our surprise and delight, on we sailed, past a spot which every one had dreaded. How it was that they thus let us pass without boarding us, we never could learn.
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1851
One of the names being used for the dreaded yellow fever was the black vomit, because it was causing its victims to vomit black blood:
MOBY-DICK: Give me something for a cane — there, that shivered lance will do. Muster the men. Surely I have not seen him yet. By heaven it cannot be! — missing? — quick! call them all.” The old man’s hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the Parsee was not there. “The Parsee!” cried Stubb — “he must have been caught in — ” “The black vomit wrench thee! — run all of ye above, alow, cabin, forecastle — find him — not gone — not gone!” But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee was nowhere to be found. “Aye, Sir,” said Stubb — “caught among the tangles of your line — I thought I saw him dragging under.”
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May 1, Thursday: The opening day for the Crystal Palace, with all 13,000 of its exhibits in place with the exception of those from Russia. There would be some 6,000,000 visitors. A best seller among the tourist throngs would be Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.”
The nude white marble of the statue “The Greek Slave” by Hiram Powers was used as the revolving centerpiece of the very extensive exhibits of the United States of America at the exhibition in London (see following screen).
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There’s statues bright Of marble white … And some I think That isn’t overproper.
The white plaster model from which Powers had worked as he carved this statue in Italy became the template for a mechanical copying device for the manufacture of many small imitations of the statue, for sale to the general public. Of course there were people who wanted to have a small copy of this statue in their living room, perhaps to make a lamp out of. On one of his models you can still see tiny black dots that had been used as registration marks for this mechanical copying device.
The Powers statue was intended to depict a virginal white female in chains, after she has been forcibly stripped by her greedy Moslem captors, while she is involuntarily displaying all her charms to lecherous Moslem bidders in the slave mart of Constantinople. Bondage! Innocence at risk! Satan triumphant! If there were any Victorian hot buttons Hiram Powers neglected to stroke, it’s not clear what hot buttons those would have been. People stood for hours as this work of art slowly revolved on its pedestal, overwhelmed by the art of this exhibit. The self-righteousness of all this impelled Punch to tweak our tail with a comment on American liberty.
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Exceedingly popular at this English exhibition were the American mass-manufactured square grand pianos, which the visitors were encouraged to play, and American mass-manufactured “six-shooters,” which the visitors were encouraged to fire. And over in that corner over there was a rather diminutive American salesman of American artificial legs, standing in front of his display booth all day, day after day, on his own pair of artificial legs, the left one starting below the knee and the right one starting above the knee, not seeming to be bothered by this at all. Colonel Samuel Colt was in London as visiting American royalty, and had his fifteen minutes of fame before the Parliament, during which he informed the Peers that:
“There is nothing that can not be produced by machinery.”
Oh, Mr. Colt, please pull out your equalizer and squeeze off six rounds of decency!
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At the Crystal Palace Exposition in London, the mass-produced Colt revolver was a crowd pleaser. Also, Jacob Sweppes distributed soda water drinks out of metal-capped individual bottles. Soda water had been invented by the Reverend Joseph Priestley several decades earlier, with the idea that fizz water would be a cure for the yellow fever.
1853
In Britain, vaccination against the small pox was made compulsory. The virus belatedly reached the Hawaiian Islands for the 1st time and, of a remainder population there of some 84,000 natives, in this year another 10,000 would die.
An outbreak of the yellow fever (also known as the black vomit) in New Orleans was killing 7,848 people.
MOBY-DICK: Give me something for a cane — there, that shivered lance will do. Muster the men. Surely I have not seen him yet. By heaven it cannot be! — missing? — quick! call them all.” The old man’s hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the Parsee was not there. “The Parsee!” cried Stubb — “he must have been caught in — ” “The black vomit wrench thee! — run all of ye above, alow, cabin, forecastle — find him — not gone — not gone!” But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee was nowhere to be found. “Aye, Sir,” said Stubb — “caught among the tangles of your line — I thought I saw him dragging under.”
Everybody knew at that time that this yellow fever had something to do with the swamp, but at the time it was being generally presumed that this was something having to do with fetid air, bad air, “malaria.” This was being presumed by almost everyone. An exception was Dr. Josiah Clark Nott, who had figured out that there was an insect vector and that that insect vector was the mosquito, and who was doing his very best to pass this critical information along to others.
In France, the physiologist Pierre Roux was demonstrating that diphtheria was being caused by a toxin produced by a bacterium, rather than by that bacterium per se.
September 15, Thursday: In Mobile, Alabama, Sarah Alice Nott, 3-year-old daughter of Dr. Josiah Clark Nott and Sarah (Sally) Deas Nott, succumbed to the yellow fever.
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September 18, Sunday: In Mobile, Alabama, a 2d child of Dr. Josiah Clark Nott and Sarah (Sally) Deas Nott, Emma Nott, succumbed to the yellow fever at the age of 10 or 11.
September 22, Thursday: In Mobile, Alabama, a 3d child of Dr. Josiah Clark Nott and Sarah (Sally) Deas Nott, Allen Huger Nott, a year or two old, succumbed to the yellow fever.
September 23, Friday: Spain appointed the Marquis Juan de la Pezuela as Captain General of Cuba. This man was well known as an opponent of human slavery, and was assigned the task of suppression of the slave trade. THE TRAFFIC IN MAN-BODY
In Mobile, Alabama, a 4th child of Dr. Josiah Clark Nott and Sarah (Sally) Deas Nott, Edward Fisher Nott, succumbed to yellow fever at the age of 18 or 19.6
6. The Nott children who would survive would be James Deas Nott II, then age 12, Henry Nott, then age 11, and Josiah Nott, Jr, then age 7 or 8 (out of a total population in the city of Mobile of about 25,000, the final tally of this epidemic would be 1,331). Of the three boys who would not succumb during this epidemic, the two old enough to become soldiers would be killed, one at Shiloh in 1862 and the other at Chickamauga in 1863. 98 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1854
Charles Pickerig Gerrish, son of a Concord teacher, graduated from Harvard College. He would become a merchant. NEW “HARVARD MEN”
In 1796, Dr. John Crawford had written a series of reports contradicting the bad-air theory “malaria,” asserting that the illness that went under that name was not being occasioned by the nature of the air of marshes and swamps but instead by tiny “eggs insinuated, without our knowledge, into our bodies” during mosquito bites, tiny eggs that were hatching within the puncture and migrating through the host’s body, and were producing the manifestations of the disease.
This notion had been considered so entirely absurd, by Dr. Crawford’s American contemporaries, that the local medical journals summarily rejected all Dr. Crawford’s articles. He was disparaged so vehemently that his medical practice began to suffer, and so he desisted from this effort. We had lost, for fully half a century, an opportunity to deal with this disease. However, in this year Lewis Daniel Beauperthy, a “traveling naturalist,” published a theory that malaria, and the yellow fever (or black vomit) as well, were being “produced by venomous fluid injected under the skin by mosquitoes like poison injected by snakes,” that marshes and swamps were made treacherous not by their miasmic vapors, but by the mosquitoes that proliferated within
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them.
WALDEN: It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions PEOPLE OF which the herd so diligently follow. The traveller who stops at WALDEN the best houses, so called, soon discovers this, for the publicans presume him to be a Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he would soon be completely emasculated. I think that in the railroad car we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and convenience, and it threatens without attaining these to become no better than a modern drawing room, with its divans, and ottomans, and sunshades, and a hundred other oriental things, which we are taking west with us, invented for the ladies of the harem and the effeminate natives of the Celestial Empire, which Jonathan should be ashamed to know the names of. I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way.
SARDANAPALUS “JONATHAN”
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Dr. Josiah Clark Nott would come to embrace this theory, and eventually would be credited as among the 1st to apply the insect vector theory to yellow fever.
Dr. Josiah Clark Nott, George Robins Gliddon, and Louis Ferdinand Alfred Maury’s INDIGENOUS RACES OF THE EARTH; OR, NEW CHAPTERS OF ETHNOLOGICAL INQUIRY; INCLUDING MONOGRAPHS ON SPECIAL DEPARTMENTS.
Few of the scientists of Professor Samuel George Morton’s day would have challenged his thesis that the race concept is a physical reality, or his assumption that cranial volume was a prime indicator of human mental
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capability or intelligence.
In this year such views were incorporated, for instance, into Dr. Josiah Clark Nott’s and the former diplomat George Robins Gliddon’s textbook TYPES OF MANKIND: OR, ETHNOLOGICAL RESEARCHES, BASED UPON THE ANCIENT MONUMENTS, PAINTINGS, SCULPTURES, AND CRANIA OF RACES, AND UPON THEIR NATURAL, GEOGRAPHICAL, PHILOLOGICAL, AND BIBLICAL HISTORY: ILLUSTRATED BY SELECTIONS FROM THE INEDITED PAPERS OF SAMUEL GEORGE MORTON, M.D., (LATE PRESIDENT OF THE ACADEMY OF NATURAL SCIENCES AT PHILADELPHIA,) AND BY ADDITIONAL CONTRIBUTIONS FROM PROF. L. AGASSIZ, LL.D., W. USHER, M.D.; AND PROF. H.S. PATTERSON, M.D. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co.; London: Trübner & Co.), which would go through ten editions offering the unaltering scientific knowledge that the mental superiority of the white man over the colored man was a proven fact. The “Negro-Races” had “ever been Servants and slaves.” TYPES OF MANKIND
The book in fact incorporates a letter from Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard, who supported such a view without any qualification whatever. The book asserts as an unchallengeable scientific finding that the Negro can exist alongside the white race only as a tributary either in name or in fact. The book quite ignores in all its editions Frederick Douglass, who, in one of his speeches during this year, in no uncertain terms denounced it: “Perhaps, of all the attempts ever made to disprove the unity of the human family, and to brand the negro with natural inferiority, the most compendious and barefaced is the book, entitled TYPES OF MANKIND, by Nott and Glidden [sic].”7
In “Sketch of the Natural Provinces of the Animal World and Their Relation to the Different Types of Man” Professor Agassiz argued that the distinct human types, in effect distinguishable species, having developed under differing conditions in different regions of the globe, could only degenerate when taken out of these
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environments to which they had accommodated.8 But race is a very great reality.... Any analysis of a great creative period ... must have this chaotic spot in its centre: the incalculable fact of racial intermixture. — Percy Wyndham Lewis, THE LION AND THE FOX: THE ROLE OF THE HERO IN THE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE (London: Methuen, 1951 [1927], page 298) Today’s reviewer of the evidences marshalled in this volume may marvel at the easy manner in which the authors interpolated their own views inside the context of quotations ostensibly from the work of others. Certain of the “quotations” placed between the covers of this work are said now to have been “half made-up.” Clearly, from the standpoint of Nott and Gliddon, there was more at stake here than mere accuracy. In the introduction to this textbook, on page 49, Nott and Gliddon indicated that their understanding of this new science ethnology was that it was not only to pose, but also to provide a definitive answer for, the $64,000 question of who had to do whose laundry, “what position in the social scale Providence has assigned to each type of man?”9 Although this was a quite expensive volume, by 1871 it would have gone through fully ten editions. This scientific treatise declared that
We have had too much of sentimentalism about the Red- man. It is time that cant was stopped now.
Also, this detailed scientific argument for the separate creation of the differing human races and the inherent inalienable superiority of some of these races over other of these races pointed out, by “supplanting inferior types” the Caucasian race rather than incurring shame and guilt would be merely “fulfilling a law of nature.” EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS
8. As another conservative biologist, Garret Harding, would be commenting, a weed is a plant that is out of place. Refer to Stepan, Nancy, “Biological Degeneration: Races and Proper Places,” in J. Edward Chamberlain and Sander L. Gilman, DEGENERATION: THE DARK SIDE OF PROGRESS (NY: Columbia UP, 1985, page 98-104). 9. Nott’s attitude was that “The time must come when the blacks will be worse than useless to us. What then? Emancipation must follow, which, from the lights before us, is but another name for extermination.” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 103 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1855
An outbreak of cholera and yellow fever in Lisbon killed nearly 8,000.
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1859
May 1: New York State began directly letting its contracts on canal work, no longer allowing that function to be performed by the supervisor of the Contracting Board.
At this point the Unitarian congregation of the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway, in Cincinnati, Ohio was at a low of a couple hundred, since the BIBLE believers of his congregation had recently separated themselves to constitute a “Church of the Redeemer,” and so he delivered his “East and West” sermon in which he described the Redeemer concept of Jesus Christ as “an idea out of the dark ages.” The Reverend Conway confessed he was no “believer in what the churches call Christianity” as it would be a “pious insult to the holiest relations of life” to suppose Jesus to have lacked a human biological father.10
Waldo Emerson lectured on ““WEALTH”,” a topic appropriate for downtown Boston, to the Parker Fraternity11 in the 1,500 comfortable seats of the Boston Music Hall, and wrote to Thomas Carlyle on the American race
10. Moncure Daniel Conway. EAST AND WEST: AN INAUGURAL DISCOURSE, DELIVERED IN THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, CINCINNATI, O., MAY 1, 1859, BY M.D. CONWAY, MINISTER OF THE CHURCH. Pamphlet. Cincinnati: Truman & Spofford, 1859. READ THE FULL TEXT
11. The megachurch “28th Congregational Society” established by the Reverend Theodore Parker, who had gone to live in Italy in an attempt to recover his health. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 105 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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problem:
I flatter myself I see some emerging of our people from the poison of their politics the insolvency of slavery begins to show, & we shall perhaps live to see that putrid Black Vomit extirpating by mere diking & planting. Another ground of contentment is the mending of the race here.
My curiosity about the origins and literary uses of this carefully observed, and carefully invented, Africanist presence has become an informal study of what I call American Africanism. It is an investigation into the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served. I am using the term “Africanism” not to suggest the larger body of knowledge on Africa that the philosopher Valentine Mudimbe means by the term “Africanism,” nor to suggest the varieties and complexities of African people and their descendants who have inhabited this country. Rather I use it as a term for the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people. As a trope, little restraint has been attached to its uses. As a disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has become, in the Eurocentric tradition that American education favors, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability. Through the simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of color on a palette, American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless. It provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom.
This “putrid Black Vomit” of which the Sage of Concord here speaks is of course the yellow fever, an infection which needs to be extirpated. The disease was called Yellow Fever because it damages the liver in such manner as to cause jaundicing of skin and eyes, and was called black vomit because a classic manifestations of severe
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infection was hemorrhage into the mucous membranes, with frightful vomiting of dark blood.
However, putrid Black vomit also was, of course, in the opinion of the Sage of Concord, the words that were coming out of the mouths of Americans of color, whose infectious thoughts and presumptions were as delusion-provoking in the white man as the fevers of this plague. What we would regard as two separate topics, the prevention of the tropical disease and the prevention of the tropical human, were quite conflated for a 19th- Century white man of Emerson’s mentality. The dark man and the dark vomit were predicting the same thing: the blackness of death. Preventing the one was preventing the other.
(Is it any wonder that this Emerson had blacklisted Frederick Douglass a decade earlier for membership in the Town and Country Club? His dark words would have been a “disabling virus” within polite literary discourse. Society, meaning white society, was not ready for that.)
May 1: Hear the ruby-crowned wren. We accuse savages of worshipping only the bad spirit, or devil, though they may distinguish both a good and a bad; but they regard only that one which they fear and worship the devil only. We too are savages in this, doing precisely the same thing. This occurred to me yesterday as I sat in the woods admiring the beauty of the blue
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butterfly. We are not chiefly interested in birds and insects, for example, as they are ornamental to the earth and cheering to man, but we spare the lives of the former only on condition that they eat more grubs than they do cherries, and the only account of the insects which the State encourages is of the “Insects Injurious to Vegetation.” We too admit both a good and a bad spirit, but we worship chiefly the bad spirit, whom we fear. We do not think first of the good but of the harm things will do us. The catechism says that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, which of course is applicable mainly to God as seen in his works. Yet the only account of its beautiful insects–butterflies, etc.– which God has made and set before us which the State ever thinks of spending any money on is the account of those which are injurious to vegetation! This is the way we glorify God and enjoy him forever. Come out here and behold a thousand painted butterflies and other beautiful insects which people the air, then go to the libraries and see what kind of prayer and glorification of God is there recorded. Massachusetts has published her report on “Insects Injurious to Vegetation,” and our neighbor the “Noxious Insects of New York.” We have attended to the evil and said nothing about the good. This is looking a gift horse in the mouth with a vengeance. Children are attracted by the beauty of butterflies, but their parents and legislators deem it an idle pursuit. The parents remind me of the devil, but the children of God. Though God may have pronounced his work good, we ask, “Is it not poisonous?” Science is inhuman. Things seen with a microscope begin to be insignificant. So described, they are as monstrous as if they should be magnified a thousand diameters. Suppose I should see and describe men and houses and trees and birds as if they were a thousand times larger than they are! With our prying instruments we disturb the balance and harmony of nature. P. M.–To Second Division. Very warm. Looking from Clamshell over Hosmer’s meadow, about half covered with water, see hundreds of turtles, chiefly picta, now first lying out in numbers on the brown pieces of meadow which rise above the water. You see their black backs shine on these hummocks left by the ice, fifty to eighty rods off. They would rapidly tumble off if you went much nearer. This heat and stillness draws them up. It is remarkable how surely they are advertised of the first warm and still days, and in an hour or two are sure to spread themselves over the hummocks. There is to-day a general resurrection of them, and there they bask in the sun. It is their sabbath. At this distance, if you are on the lookout, especially with a glass, you can discover what numbers of them there are, but they are shy and will drop into the water on a near approach. All up and down our river meadows their backs are shining in the sun to-day. It is a turtle day. As we sat on the steep hillside south of Nut Meadow Brook Crossing, we noticed a remarkable whirlwind on a small scale, which carried up the oak leaves from that Island copse in the meadow. The oak leaves now hang thinly and are very dry and light, and these small whirlwinds, which seem to be occasioned by the sudden hot and calm weather (like whirlpools or dimples in a smooth stream), wrench them off, and up they go, somewhat spirally, in countless flocks like birds, with a rustling sound; and higher and higher into the clear blue deeps they rise above our heads, till they are fairly lost to sight, looking, when last seen, mere light specks against the blue, like stars by day, in fact. I could distinguish some, I have no doubt, five or six hundred feet high at least, but if I looked aside a moment they were lost. The largest oak leaves looked not bigger than a five-cent-piece. These were drifting eastward,–to descend where? Methought that, instead of decaying on the earth or being consumed by fire, these were being translated and would soon be taken in at the windows of heaven. I had never observed this phenomenon so remarkable. The flight of the leaves. This was quite local, and it was comparatively still where we sat a few rods on one side. Thousands went up together in a rustling flock. Many of the last oak leaves hang thus ready to go up. I noticed two or more similar whirlwinds in the woods elsewhere this afternoon. One took up small twigs and clusters of leaves from the ground, matted together. I could easily see where it ran along with its nose (or point of its tunnel) close to the ground, stirring up the leaves as it travelled, like the snout of some hunting or rooting animal. See and hear chewink. See a little snake on the dry twigs and chips in the sun, near the arbutus, uniformly brown (or reddish-brown) above except a yellowish ring on the occiput, the head also lighter than the body; beneath vermilion, with apparently a row of light dots along each side. It is apparently Coluber amaenus (?), except that it has the yellowish ring. Luzula campestris. Also the Oryzopsis Canadensis by the Major Heywood path-side, say a day, or April 30th, six inches high or more, with fine bristle-like leaves. See a thrasher. What is that rush at Second Division? It now forms a dense and very conspicuous mass some four rods long and one foot high. The top for three inches is red, and the impression at a little distance is like that made by sorrel. Certainly no plant of this character exhibits such a growth now, i. e. in the mass. It surprises you to see it, carries your thoughts on to June. The climbing fern is persistent, i. e. retains its greenness still, though now partly brown and withered.
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1860
February 2, day: A South Carolina spokesperson for slavery and for secession explained the situation on the ground in the South, when he declared “I mistrust our own people more than I fear all the efforts of the Abolitionists.” He was referring to the threat represented by the attitude of Southern whites too poor to own slaves. If these people had been able to seize an occasion offered by a successful army of black fugitives armed with rifles and pikes after the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in order to act, in pogrom, against the institution of slavery that was harming them as well as the slave by interfering with their livelihoods, a genocide against all the unprotected black Americans of the South would most likely have ensued. As Peter Wallenstein has succinctly explained the political situation in the South: Even if a successful attack by nonslaveholding whites against slavery appeared improbable at the voting booths or in the legislatures, other kinds of threats could not be so readily dismissed. Some whites disliked slavery out of a sense of companionship, or for religious or other reasons. Some disliked it because it drove down their own pay and limited rather than fostered their prospects; some who might have supported slavery turned against it when their chances of becoming slaveholders themselves seemed to fade. For some whites in the South, in short, slavery was a threat or an abomination, whether because of what it did to whites or because of what it did to blacks. Proslavery forces would do what they could to cow or cajole fellow whites into following their lead.
(Actually, I offer that Wallenstein has not here adequately represented the position of the white people for whom it was distressing that any of these inferior people of color were present on the soil of the New World, who were abolitionists because they desired that all members of the black race be either elsewhere, or dead, and who considered that whichever one of those two options was implemented didn’t much matter to them. This was certainly a prevalent attitude in the North —as indicated by Waldo Emerson’s reference on May 1, 1859 to Americans of color as “putrid Black Vomit,” which is to say, as a disease –“black vomit” was one of the names used in this period for the dreaded deadly “yellow fever”– and I would have supposed it would have been at least as prevalent in the South.)12 RACE POLITICS
12. Upon the secession of South Carolina from the federal union, William Elliott, who up to that point had been a political opponent of nullification, would opt to side with the Confederacy. He had been an opponent of secession only because he was fearful that the economy of the South would be inadequate to sustain independence — his had never been a principled opposition to secession, for he had never had the slightest qualm about race slavery, believing that the South’s peculiar institution was “sanctioned by religion, conducive to good morals, and useful, nay indispensable.” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 109 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1862
Thomas Wakley, the doctor who had founded the international medical journal The Lancet, died of tuberculosis while on a rest cure in the mild climate of Madeira.
During this year for the 1st time a linkage would be being made, by Louis Pasteur, between specific germs and specific diseases. TB YELLOW FEVER
Was Henry Thoreau giving off the feverish redness associated with the terminal stage of tuberculosis, which Walt Whitman described in his poetry as “this hectic glow”?13 ASSLEY
13. Warner, John Harley. THE THERAPEUTIC PERSPECTIVE: MEDICAL PRACTICE, KNOWLEDGE, AND IDENTITY IN AMERICA, 1820-1885. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1986 “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
Before the Civil War era, American medicine got involved in a self-defined system of medical practice and rigorously stemmed efforts to introduce European (especially French) ideas about the nature of disease, treatment, etc. The American style was to see each patient as an individual, requiring individual therapy. In general the approach was interventionist — the doctor always did something, especially, he found which fluids were in excess (blood, crap, etc.), and bled, purged. This early work was “rationalism” as opposed to foreign “empiricism.” Until the 1860s, disease-specific treatment was professionally illegitimate (with the one exception that doctors did treat malaria with quinine, since it worked so well). Despite the apparent silliness of the American approach, and even though European medicine was, we now know, on the right path as far as identifying symptoms and diseases and then treating all patients the same way, it wasn’t until late in the century that the treatments were reliable. There’s some slight of hand in all this — if there is a consistent, rational way to treat an identifiable disease, then anyone can be a doctor. Later in the century, much of the aggressive bleeding and purging was replaced with opiates (at their high mark in the 1850s). Also, medical education began to become professionalized, rather than just having the faculty chat about cases, and doctors actually conducted physiological experiments, laboratories, and exams (you need a stethoscope to listen to the heart).
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1864
Dr. Luke Blackburn, a Confederate sympathizer, arrived in Bermuda from Halifax, Nova Scotia and began to care for the people there who were suffering under an epidemic of the yellow fever. He refused all payment. The good doctor stayed, however, to help out, only for a month, and when he returned home he carried along with him, curiously, three trunks packed full of the clothing of the sufferers, their dirty poultices, their soiled blankets and sheets. Many of the items Dr. Blackburn had collected were stained with the black vomit, the dried blood that sufferers from the yellow fever would cough up.
The good doctor was hoping he would be able to use these materials to start an epidemic of the yellow fever in New-York.
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“For what it’s worth, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill told the American people, “We didn’t come this far because we are made of sugar candy,” and that reminder was taken seriously. We proceeded to develop and deliver the time bomb, the bomb. Even though roughly 150,000 men women and children perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with a single blow WWII was over. Following New York’s September 11 Pearl Harbor Winston Churchill was not here to remind us. That we didn’t come this far because we’re made of sugar candy.
So, we mustered our humanity. We gave old pals a pass. Even though men and women from Saudi Arabia were largely responsible for the devastation of New York, and Pennsylvania and our Pentagon, we called Saudi Arabians our partners against terrorism and we sent men with rifles into Afghanistan and Iraq, and kept our best weapons in their silos. Even now, we stand there dying. Daring to do nothing decisive because we’ve declared ourselves to be better than our terrorist enemies. More moral, more civilized. Our image is at stake, we insist. But we didn’t come this far because we’re made of sugar candy. Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and across this continent by giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans. That was biological warfare. And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on to grab this land from whomever. And we grew prosperous. And yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves. So it goes with most great nation-states, which –feeling guilty about their savage pasts– eventually civilize themselves out of business and wind up invaded and ultimately dominated by the lean, hungry up-and-coming who are not made of sugar candy. — Disney/ABC radio personality Paul Harvey, expressing family values on June 23, 2005
However, the US consul in Bermuda, a Mr. Allen, had been informed of these suspicious activities, and the matter had come up at a public meeting. One person at that meeting was secretly a sympathizer with the Southron cause, attempting to protect and defend human slavery, so he signaled to the man who had charge of the three trunks, a Mr. Swan. Swan was preparing to burn the collected materials, in order to destroy the evidence of these bioterrorism activities, when the authorities broke in upon him.14
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1878
Caleb G. Forshey’s THE PHYSICS OF THE GULF OF MEXICO (Salem).
Yet another epidemic of the yellow fever swept the valley of the lower Mississippi. As yet nobody knew that it was the mosquitoes of the swamp, rather than the fetid air itself, that was transmitting this plague from person to person.
1879
Dr. Carlos Juan Finlay, a Cuban physician, originated the theory of the transmission of yellow fever by mosquito as vectors. It wasn’t the fetid air of the swamp, he hypothesized — it was the mosquitoes in the fetid air of the swamp.15
14. We have known since 1901 that this plot would have failed even had it not been discovered and intercepted, because we learned that the yellow fever is spread by infected mosquitoes, not by any contact with contaminated articles. However, when you think about the US Civil War, you should factor into your thinking the fact that had the Southron seceding states been able to figure out the details of germ warfare, the outcome of this strife and the trajectory of our nation would have been entirely different.
15. He was a stutterer. When he read his paper before a scientific body, nobody asked any questions or had any comments. They simply moved on to the other presenters. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 113 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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20TH CENTURY
1900
Dr. Walter Reed and his colleagues confirmed the 1879 hypothesis of Dr. Carlos Juan Finlay, that the vector for the transmission of the yellow fever from patient to patient was the mosquito.16
1902
The French attempt to build the Panama Canal was abandoned after 20 years with the work but 40% accomplished, and an expenditure of $200,000,000 down the drain, and the loss of the lives of 16,500 laborers to yellow fever and malaria.
1905
June 22: Demetrios Rallis replaced Theodoros Pangaiou Diligiannis as Prime Minister of Greece.
The first movement of his Piano Sonata in F Minor by was performed for the initial time, in the Beethovensaal, Berlin, by the composer Charles T. Griffes.
A severe epidemic of yellow fever began in New Orleans. As this would play out through October, some 3,000 people would contract the disease and there would be some 400 deaths. (This would be the final major outbreak of yellow fever in the United States of America.)
16. You need to bear carefully in mind the fact that, although we now fully grasp the mode of transmission of this disease and thus can more effectively take prior action to prevent epidemics, the treatment for this ailment once it has been contracted remains merely the keeping of the patient as comfortable as possible, and of course ensuring that dehydration does not set in. Although nowadays we no longer attempt to cure the disease by such harmful techniques of medical science as bloodletting, this viral ailment remains as untreatable today as ever it has been. 114 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1956
There had not been a major outbreak of the yellow fever in the US since 1905. The US military therefore released mosquitoes carefully pre-infected with the yellow fever over Savannah, Georgia and over Avon Park, Florida, reasoning that if a major outbreak of the yellow fever were to occur, it would clearly have been caused by these treated war mosquitos, and this would demonstrate their effectiveness as a weapon of combat.
Following each test, Army agents posing as public health officials cruised around looking for impact among the various populations of unsuspecting civilian test subjects. GERM WARFARE SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS
1991
Bob Arnebeck’s THROUGH A FIERY TRIAL: BUILDING WASHINGTON 1790-1800 (Madison Books, http:// members.aol.com/Swamp1800).
DESTROYING ANGEL: BENJAMIN Rush, Yellow Fever AND THE BIRTH OF MODERN MEDICINE
(an on-line book by Bob Arnebeck with companion essays and primary documents) After the publication of my book, I began researching the yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s. Historians have generally resolved these epidemics into one -that in Philadelphia in 1793 which killed 5,000 people- and relegated that to an exotic episode in that city’s history. Charles Brockden Brown, in the preface to his novel ARTHUR MERVYN OR MEMOIRS OF THE YEAR 1793, wrote “the evils of pestilence by which this city has lately been afflicted will probably form an era in its history.” Historians have not agreed. Brown is partly to blame. He wrote his novel after languishing near death, while his best friend Dr. Elihu Smith died in a room next to him, during the 1798 yellow fever epidemic in New York City which killed from 2,000 to 3,000 people. Perhaps if Brown had addressed the recurrence of the epidemics and the various cities they scourged, historians might have better understood their significance. A social history of this era of epidemics which spread terror from Norfolk to cities north of Boston must be written. I set out to do that but soon realized from feedback from other historians of the period that there is a tendency to minimize the impact of yellow fever because of the modern understanding of the disease and a modern revulsion to 18th century explanations of the disease. We know now that it “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 115 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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is caused by a specific vector, the Aedes aegypti mosquito, and that vector has a limited range - a few city block, which makes the disease largely an urban phenomena. In the 1790s the disease was widely blamed on fundamental changes in the atmosphere that infected all of the country east of the Mississippi River. When developing these startling theories, contemporaries, especially Benjamin Rush and Noah Webster, did not use methods now considered acceptable science. Rush, a figure of great historical interest apart from his medical ideas, seems to especially jar the modern sensibilities. Medical historians denigrate him as perhaps our last major Medieval medical practitioner. I began to realize that to begin to make sense of the epidemics’ influence on American history, it was necessary to begin to make sense of what Rush did during the epidemics and how that influenced his medical ideas. On one level this web page offers my manuscript on Rush. On another level there are excerpts from an earlier manuscript. more descriptive and less argumentative. In order, in a small way, to show how a study of the epidemics throws interesting lights on the social history of the times, I am also including primary documents that I used. Unfortunately, while I wrote the manuscript with the computer, I did not research with it. However, I have the leisure and inclination to type in documents, especially if there seems to be interest in them out their in the world wide web. So click around and get one man’s experience as he tried to write a history of these extraordinary events in American history. Let me know what you think: mailto:[email protected] Prologue: my introduction to the manuscript in which I outline my argument. Chapter One: why Rush and his contemporaries did not anticipate the germ theory of disease nor suspect insects as a cause of fevers. Despite that Rush was still able to recognize the deaths along the Philadelphia waterfront as yellow fever and react with energy to combat its spread. In 1802 an anonymous letter to the Philadelphia newspapers suggested insects as a cause for fever. I cite this document in chapter one and explain why Rush had other ideas. Chapter Two: Rush found treating the fever difficult. He refused to indulge in fatalism or denial as other doctors did. His religious Millennialism and frustrations with the theories of fevers he learned at Edinburgh energized his efforts to understand the disease. The Quaker merchant Benjamin Smith wrote almost daily letters to his father and others during the epidemic. This early letter discusses illnesses in his family. While it doesn’t mention Rush, it shows the difficult situation Philadelphia doctors faced in late August 1793. Chapter Three: Rush led efforts to control the disease by attacking the complacency of his colleagues. He also investigated the medical literature to learn about the
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morbid anatomy of the disease. He decided the fever was “seated” in the liver, which led him to use calomel in large doses. Rush wrote almost daily letters to his wife about the progress of the epidemic and his efforts to treat it. In a portion of one, he wrote about the difficult symptoms he had to treat. Chapter Four: Rush believed medical progress depended on candid communication with his colleagues and their candid testing of new ideas. At a meeting of the College of Physicians he explained his mercurial treatment. However, one dying colleague, James Hutchinson, refused to try his remedies. Another denied that Rush had any success with true yellow fever patients of whom there were very few. Many were fooled by a momentary lull in the number of deaths, but not Rush. He enlisted African Americans, thought immune to the disease, to nurse fever victims. Chapter Five: While many believed the claims Rush made for the success of his remedies and while many hailed Rush as a savior, his medical colleagues published letters in the newspapers recommending other remedies. Rush responded to the challenge by also publishing his remedies. Meanwhile he continued to adjust his prescriptions as he sensed the nature of the fever changing. Again his understanding of morbid anatomy prompted these changes. He began to recommend bleeding as well as purging. Rush was most enraged at the letters written by Drs. Adam Kuhn and Edward Stevens. Chapter Six: In describing his successful treatment of Alexander Hamilton, Dr. Edward Stevens attacked the theory behind Rush’s treatment. A French doctor, Jean Deveze, took control of the city’s fever hospital and privately impugned Rush’s therapies. Rush continued to win allies, even one of the doctors who helped Deveze autopsy victims. Rush orchestrated a publicity campaign lauding his simple therapies. Chapter Seven: the increasing death toll, including three of Rush’s apprentices and his sister challenged his assurances that he could control the fever. Other doctors continued to write from outside the city that his methods were wrong. Others in the city resolved the crisis in religious or class terms. Rush tenaciously maintained his scientific gains. His continued exposure to his patients continued to confirm his faith in his practices. Chapter Eight: In the first week of October, Rush was incapacitated by the disease, not only physically. Fears that colleagues conspired to ruin his practice infuriated him. At epidemic’s end, he feared that the world would not believe the lessons he had learned from it. A letter from Rush to Dr. Caspar Wistar shows his
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bitterness at the slights of his colleagues. Chapter Nine: In describing his personal experiences and scientific work during the epidemic, Rush tried to make the epidemic a challenge to the nation as a whole. His account of the epidemic was as much a guide to the coming “sickly season” as a history of the past. By blaming local pollution for the epidemic rather than imported contagion, Rush excited opposition from commercial interests and energized reformers. Chapter Ten: Epidemics in Baltimore, New Haven and New York confirmed aspects of Rush’s model of the etiology of a yellow fever epidemic. His therapies won support in those cities. His own work on a handful of yellow fever cases allowed him to better quantify the benefits of bleeding. He extended his yellow fever therapies to other diseases, and began to consolidate his medical ideas and experiences into a new system of medicine. [Because it was small and well documented, and completely forgotten by history, the New York epidemic of 1795 might be fruitfully studied. Here is the beginning of a cache of documents about it, including a list of its victims.] Chapter Eleven: Despite the carping of modern critics, Rush’s theory of the unity of disease served the useful purpose of destroying the artificial nosologies of the 18th century, much to the delight of medical students. The benefits of Rush reviving interest in copious bleeding were more problematical. A “phalanx” of young doctors joined the cause. As an alternative to hard liquor and opium, bleeding had virtues as a pain killer and sedative. Chapter Twelve: The epidemic of 1797 challenged Rush’s etiology and therapies. His rival William Currie first recognized the epidemic and anticipated its spread. The editor William Cobbett led an attack on Rush for his “remorseless bleeding,” prompting Rush to sue for libel. More attacks led another doctor to challenge Rush to a duel. Chapter Thirteen: Despite the controversy Rush continued to respond creatively to the yellow fever crisis, solidifying, especially in the minds of younger doctors, his leadership role in American medicine. A new medical journal, the Medical Repository, and the work of Noah Webster on epidemics exemplified this. Chapter Fourteen: The 1798 epidemics in Philadelphia, New York, Boston and elsewhere mocked the pretensions of Rush and his allies. They could not control the epidemic nor successfully treat the fever. Rather than retreat into the countryside, as his wife urged, Rush found a new point of observation, the city’s fever hospital where he helped younger colleagues. While not encouraged by the results of his therapies, he remained
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convinced that they were better than others or no treatment. He did decide that the fever was not contagious. Chapter Fifteen: While Rush found treating the victims of the 1798 epidemic frustrating, other doctors claimed to have successfully used his remedies. The repeated epidemics and the power of yellow fever seemed to divide society into two camps: those who, largely thanks to Rush’s work, still retained confidence in medicine, and those who refused all medicine. Chapter Sixteen: In the wake of the epidemic civic leaders enforced clean up and purification of bedding and houses of the poor. An attempt was made to institute reforms to prevent another epidemic. While informed by scientific opinions on the epidemic, they tried to avoid the scientific controversy. They foundered because of a lack of money. Confronted with yet another epidemic in 1799 the city’s elite fled, leaving the relief effort in the hands of a man who saw dispensing comfort to the dying as the only valid reaction to the epidemic. Rush served again at the hospital and tried again to educate the public. Chapter Seventeen: In the defeat and confusion of the epidemics, Rush’s inspirational role in the development of American medicine became apparent. His importance in creating the expectations that made modern medicine possible was best symbolized by his victory in Rush v. Cobbett. Medical research was given protection from the carping of uninformed critics. Chapter Eighteen: A concluding chapter rejects the current model for the rise and fall of Rush’s therapies. His work is best understood as a reaction to the onslaught of dangerous malignant fevers, especially yellow fever. The decline of his influence, as observers at the time noted, is best explained by the changes in the nature and prevalence of diseases, especially malaria and yellow fever.
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: May 3, 2013
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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button.
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Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge. Place your requests with
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