Historic Philadelphia

sponges over their noses, tied bags of camphor
around their necks, carried bits of tarred rope,
chewed garlic, smoked cigars (even women and
children.) The best preventive was to get out of
town. Anybody who could afford it moved to
the country. President Washington went home
to Mount Vernon; when he had to return in the
fall, he ran the government from the Morris
house in Germantown. Governor Mifflin was
sick, but recovered at his country mansion
overlooking the Falls of Schuylkill.
Clarkson set up a hospital in the Andrew
Hamilton mansion at Bush Hill, at about what
would now be Nineteenth Street below
Fairmount Avenue. Two citizens who could
have fled the city risked their lives as volunteers
to run the hospital: a Moravian barrelmaker
named Peter Helm, and a forty-three-year-old,
up-and-coming merchant, Stephen Girard.
People avoided each other on the street.
Most businesses closed. Funerals were sparsely
attended. There are tales of sufferers falling
dead in the street and thieves stripping the
corpses of clothes and possessions.
Most of the moving of victims, dead and
alive, was done by black Philadelphians. There
was a rumor that African Americans were
immune. Richard Allen and Absolom Jones,
religious leaders, volunteered the services of
the Free African Society, which they had
founded in 1787, and Mayor Clarkson
accepted. In September, as they helped the sick
and dying, blacks began to be stricken; so
much for immunity. Allen and his colleagues
continued to transport victims, build coffins,
and even administer purges and bleedings to
victims of both races.
There was an added nuisance that summer,
though hardly worth complaint during the
yellow death: there was an uncommon number
of mosquitoes.
The epidemic ended with the November
frosts. Some five thousand persons had died,
almost ten percent of the city’s population.
The yellow fever became an annual summer
event, to one degree or another, and
Philadelphians were almost blasé about it. On
August 30, 1797, a Philadelphian wrote
detachedly that “the deaths during the last 24
hours number only eight adults and six
children. It is surprising that so insignificant a
number should create so much excitement in
this city as well as in the country.”
In August of ’98 the sickness made another
strong showing. There were 3,637 fatalities, a
mass exodus of citizens much like ’93, and
people living in tents on empty lots because
fresh air was thought to be more healthful. The
as yet unnamed Washington Square was used
for yellow fever victim burials in 1793, and
again in 1798 although City Council had
closed it to burials in 1795.
In 1802 Stubbins Firth of the University of
Pennsylvania Medical School would decide to
prove that yellow fever was not contagious
through contact with victims. He put fever
victims’ vomit in a cut in his arm twenty times.
He drank vomit several times, and once poured
some in his eye. He never became sick. It
would be the year 1900 before science linked
yellow fever to mosquitoes.
✧
Dr. Benjamin Rush, the city’s most
prominent physician, entered yellow fever
sick rooms during the 1793 epidemic with
optimistic bedside manner, administered
strong purgatives (“a dose for a horse”
criticized a competitor doctor) and took
quantities of blood. Some patients survived
both the disease and the treatment. Dr. Rush
himself had the fever, but kept practicing,
dashing through the streets in his carriage.
Rival doctors had rival cures, and those
physicians who hadn’t abandoned any sense
of duty and left town bickered publicly over
what treatment was best.
COURTESY OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA, DEPARTMENT
OF RECORDS, CITY ARCHIVES.
CHAPTER II
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