MURPHY, Jim - An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793

AN AMERICAN PLAGUE: 

THE TRUE AND TERRIFYING STORY OF
THE YELLOW FEVER EPIDEMIC OF 1793

by Jim Murphy

QUOTES FOR DISCUSSION

Washington was then president of the United States, and Philadelphia was the temporary capital of the young nation and the center of its federal government.

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Naturally, the French Republic had time to the United States for help, only to have President Washington hesitate.

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"There was something in the heat and drought," the good doctor, [Dr. Rush], speculated, "which was uncommon, in their influence upon the human body."

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The Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth of the Lutheran congregation, too, thought something was wrong in the city, though it had nothing to do with sickness of the body. It was the souls of its citizens he worried about. "Philadelphia... seemed to strive to exceed all other places in the breaking of the Sabbath," he noted. An increasing number people shunned church and went instead to the taverns, where they drank and gambled; too many others spent their free time in theaters which displayed "rope dancing and other shows." Sooner or later, he warned, the city would feel God's displeasure.

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Eight deaths in the space of a week in two houses on the same street... But the city did not take notice. Summer fevers were common visitors to all American cities in the eighteenth century, and therefore not headline news.

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He, [Dr. Benjamin Rush], was passionate and outspoken in his beliefs, no matter what the subject. He opposed slavery, shelf that alcohol and tobacco should be avoided, urged that the corporal punishment of children be stopped, and thought that the best way to keep a democracy strong was by having universal education.

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The sickness begin with chills, headache, and a painful aching in the back, arms, and legs. A high fever developed, accompanied by constipation. This stage lasted around three days, and then the fever suddenly broke and the patients seem to recover. But only for a few short hours. The next stage saw the fever shoot up again. The skin and eyeballs turned yellow, as red blood cells were destroyed, causing the bile pigment bilirubin to accumulate in the body; nose, gums, and intestines begin bleeding; and the patient vomited stale, black blood. Finally, the pulse grew weak, the tongue turned a dry brown, and the victim became depressed, confused, and delirious. Rush noted another sign as well; tiny reddish eruptions on the skin. ...they "resembled moscheto bites."

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The symptoms he was seeing reminded him of a sickness that had swept through Philadelphia back in 1762, when he was sixteen years old and studying under Dr. Redmond. ... He boldly announced that the disease they now confronted was the dreaded yellow fever.

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Yellow fever was one of the most vicious diseases in the world and would create Panic anywhere. It appeared suddenly, savaged its victims' bodies, and - because there was absolutely no cure - killed at an alarming pace.

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The next day, Governor Mifflin claimed he wasn't feeling well and headed for his country home far from the fouled air of the state house. In effect, the government of Pennsylvania had closed its doors as tightly as any of Philadelphia's shopkeepers had.

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Every one of them had suffered in one way or another at the hands of whites some of them in appalling ways.

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As recently as that very summer they had been shown their position in the Philadelphia society that was now pleading for their help.

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If any group of individuals had reason to ignore the suffering of their neighbors, the Elders of the Free African Society certainly did. Yep they did not hesitate. They were, as Jones and Allen would write later, "sensible that it was our duty to do all the good we could to our fellow mortals."

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To say that Clarkson was grateful for their aid is an understatement; everyone else the mayor had counted on to help battle the spreading fever - leaders in the business community, church groups, elected representatives, and civil servants - had fled in terror. The Free African Society was the one and only group to step forward and offer its services.

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That is why the mayor and a small group of citizens had taken the drastic and illegal step of calling for the formation of a special committee to run Philadelphia. Clarkson and his committee had, in effect, seized control of the government. If he needed proof that this was a necessary action, it greeted him that morning at the steps of city hall. There Clarkson had to push his way through a crowd of vendors selling coffins and patent medicine cures.

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"Others... looked only for mere cold, whether attendance by rain or not, because histories of this fever assured them that cold had always been faithful to the infection."

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Almost all epidemics follow the same pattern, striking during warm weather, disappearing with the first hard frost.

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It was in 1900 that a young doctor, Jesse Lazear, entered the picture as a member of the US Army Yellow Fever Commission.

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Despite the evidence provided by Reed's commission, many people were still not convinced that the bite of a tiny mosquito could cause a fatal illness.

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The actual source of the yellow fever virus -  tree-dwelling monkeys in African and American rain forests - was not identified until 1929.  And a safe and effective vaccine was not developed until 1937.

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