American Eden

by Victoria Johnson

  He then turned their attention to a topic of some delicacy: sex. It was now known that many plants resembled animals in their manner of reproduction, Hosack told his students. Thanks to the dogged work of many botanists, especially Linnaeus, “at this day I believe there are none who study the vegetable kingdom in any part of the world who do not admit the universality of the sexual machine.”

  THAT SUMMER OF 1795 was hotter, one New Yorker observed, than the West Indies, but without the relief of the islands’ evening breezes. At his house on Maiden Lane, Hosack checked a thermometer several times a day and wondered at the consistently high temperatures. Hosack’s former anatomy teacher, Bayley, meditated at his home on Broadway on how unbearably humid the summer was turning out to be. People kept complaining to him that everything in their houses had sprouted a rind of mold—books, shoes, floors, wallpaper.

  Suddenly the city erupted like a swollen boil. In July, Hamilton was assaulted in the street. It happened on an overcast day in the middle of the month, near the corner of Broad and Wall Streets, where Hamilton, who had moved back to New York earlier that year, had gone to confront a crowd gathering to protest the terms of the Jay Treaty. Although Jay had signed the treaty in London all the way back in November 1794, the United States Senate had only just ratified it (minus one article) in June 1795. The American public had learned of its exact contents at the beginning of July, just as Jay was being sworn in as the new governor of New York. Enraged anti-British Americans—otherwise known as bloodthirsty Jacobins, said one Federalist newspaper—immediately burned Governor Jay in effigy up and down the Eastern Seaboard and denounced the treaty as “humiliating.”

  On July 18, opponents of the treaty converged by arrangement on City Hall before marching through the streets and burning a copy of the treaty and, for good measure, a portrait of the governor himself. Hamilton was helping to spearhead the counterdemonstration that day, and as he strained to make his defense of the treaty heard over the crowd, some people responded by throwing rocks at him. At least one struck him in the head. Hamilton retreated indignantly, in the process almost committing himself to two duels. (In the end, both conflicts were settled off the dueling ground.)

  The city’s soaring political fevers soon collided with the real thing. Around July 19, the British ship Zephyr arrived at New York from Port-au-Prince and unloaded most of its cargo at the foot of William Street before sailing out into the East River to dump twenty-two barrels of spoiled coffee. A few weeks later, a brief, painful notice appeared in a New England newspaper. “The Yellow Fever prevails in New York.” The son of a prominent New York politician had been stricken: “Mr. Amiel Jenkins . . . is in the last stage of the Yellow Fever—His tongue lies clot[t]ed in blood, and his physicians consequently despair of his recovery.”

  New York had largely been spared the devastation visited on Philadelphia during the terrible epidemics of 1793 and 1794. While Hosack had been rambling through meadows with Curtis in the late-summer sunshine, yellow fever weeded out thousands of people in Philadelphia. Not every individual who contracted yellow fever died, but the course of the illness in those who did took one terrifying turn after another. First came chills, intense back pain, and yellowing skin; then came a black crust on the tongue, delirium, and a diarrhea that resembled molasses. In the last hours of life, victims often lay with their knees drawn up toward their chins, as if to shield themselves from an attacker. Expiring bodies purged their contents so violently that the dying seemed to be retching up chunks of their own stomachs in vomit that had the look and feel of coffee grounds.

  Benjamin Rush, like many others in Philadelphia, believed that the illness had originated from a damaged shipment of coffee that had been unloaded, rotting, on a wharf. For weeks, he trudged up staircase after staircase to the sickrooms of the dying. Mapping the stages of yellow fever in his notebooks, he set down the stark details of human misery. “I found Mr. Cochran sitting on the side of his bed, with a pot in his hand, into which he was discharging black bile from his stomach, on the 6th day of the disorder. He died on the next day.” By the end of the epidemic, more than four thousand putrefying bodies had been trundled to gravesites and potters’ fields, past the deserted townhouses of those who had escaped to the countryside or were already dead.

  Rush insisted that in the treatment of yellow fever, bloodletting, along with liberal doses of mercury, was of paramount importance. The loss of blood, he claimed, reduced inflammation, lowered the heart rate, and alleviated pain. In a report he published a few years later, he noted that every patient he had saved in 1793 had been bled, and he therefore resolved to use the lancet even more vigorously during the yellow-fever epidemic that hit Philadelphia the following year. He sliced through the tender skin of a girl named Sally Eyre nine times, spilling eighty ounces of her blood into a waiting bowl. He relieved a man named John Madge of almost double that amount in twelve sessions. For all the horror he witnessed, Rush found a sinister beauty in the treatments. The blood of some patients left “a beautiful scarlet coloured sediment in the bottom of the bowl.”

  Others abhorred bloodletting. In early September 1793, Alexander Hamilton had fallen ill at his country residence outside Philadelphia, and Eliza Hamilton a few days later. (Jefferson refused to believe that Hamilton really did have yellow fever and wrote James Madison a mean-spirited letter saying so.) Alexander and Eliza were speedily cured by Edward Stevens, an old acquaintance (possibly a relative) of Hamilton from the West Indies, who eschewed bloodletting in favor of cold baths, Peruvian bark, Madeira, and brandy. On September 11, Hamilton published an open letter to Philadelphia’s College of Physicians touting Stevens’s approach, and within a week Stevens himself had published an account of his methods. Rush was livid. He thought Stevens’s treatment ineffective and believed Hamilton’s implicit criticism of bloodletting was politically motivated; everyone knew Rush was a staunch supporter of Jefferson. When the news of the epidemic had reached Hosack in London, however, he heard people praising Rush’s bold methods.

  Now, in the summer of 1795, as signs of illness began to make their appearance at the houses closest to the East River wharves, Hosack held out hope that the disease was not, in fact, yellow fever. Like many other people, he thought that yellow fever was contagious. If the tendrils of rumor were permitted to reach out across the green fields of Long Island and New Jersey, up toward Boston and down toward Philadelphia, the city would face economic disaster. Ships’ captains would sail their vessels toward healthier ports, unloading their cargo on the wharves of other cities. Farmers would stop loading their produce and livestock onto ferries bound for the markets of lower Manhattan. Men of all classes, along with their families—merchants, artisans, and day laborers alike—would be ruined. Malnutrition would strengthen the destructive force of the epidemic.

  On a Saturday evening in mid-August 1795, the city’s physicians—Hosack likely among them—converged on City Hall for an emergency meeting. At their head was Mitchill, who had set aside his pioneering research on the anesthetic effects of nitrous oxide (later known as laughing gas) to help stem the rising tide of anxiety in the city. The physicians issued a terse statement to the press: “It was agreed to, as the opinion of this meeting, that no case of yellow fever exists within the circle of practice of any person, now present; and that the same be declared to their fellow citizens, with a view to calm their apprehensions, on the present occasion.” Within a few days, though, Mitchill decamped to his country house on Long Island. Confusion reigned in New York. Was it, or wasn’t it, yellow fever?

  On September 3, Hosack wrote to Rush. “You will no doubt expect a line upon the subject of fever as prevailing here.” The three patients Hosack had treated thus far, he told Rush, appeared to have contracted typhus, and after his experience on the Mohawk the previous year, Hosack believed typhus less deadly than yellow fever. The approximately fifty cases of fever he had heard about were mainly along the East River, where laborers and sailors lived in the kind of filth
y quarters favorable to the spread of typhus. Hosack informed Rush that Columbia’s medical professors were treating so many patients in that part of town that “it has actually become proverbial that the faculty is always to be found in Water Street.”

  All that autumn, the body count climbed and terrifying rumors whirled through the city. It was said that a dockworker had stuck his arm into a damaged bale of imported cotton, and when he withdrew it, it had turned yellow from the contagion festering inside. Along the Battery, soldiers unleashed cannonades in a vain effort to disperse the sickly air rising from stagnant water around the wharves and in the island’s marshy lowlands. Panicked letters were loaded onto mail stages up and down the coast. Richard Bayley noted sadly that the terror brought out the worst in people. In early September, a group of neighbors on Water Street attempted to have a sixteen-year-old girl forcibly deported to the countryside. She had apparently come down with a cold, and she recovered in two days.

  The advice coming in from Philadelphia, a city still licking its wounds from the 1793 and 1794 epidemics, was continued vigilance. “Let not the good people of New York and the other towns be too sanguine,” one newspaper recommended. “Rather let them be cautious. It is better to fear too far than to trust too far.” In New York, the Federalist newspaper American Minerva, edited by Noah Webster, mocked that advice: “The alarm of the Philadelphians at the Yellow Fever resembles the alarm of our Jacobins about the treaty. Raw head and bloody bones, ghosts, goblins, slavery, famine, pestilence, and the Lord knows what evils will befall us, if we have a treaty with Great Britain.” Some New Yorkers simply persisted in maintaining that all was well. An anonymous “Inhabitant of Peck’s Slip”—the East River wharf at the epicenter of the outbreak—swore in a newspaper in early September that “there has been not an individual, except two, in the whole slip, been ailing, and they had trifling colds, and they are now perfectly well.”

  But over the next weeks, as the dead began to emerge from their houses to be spirited away for burial in churchyards and potters’ fields, many New Yorkers, including Hosack, conceded that yellow fever had seized the city. Eleven people had reportedly died on August 25 alone, and by September 8, John Broome, the chairman of the city health committee, had recorded nearly a hundred deaths. The hired men who carried the bodies away sometimes showed a shocking lack of respect for both the living and the dead; in a letter, the mother of one of Hosack’s students referred to these men as “the hearse monsters.”

  The epidemic threw the whole Eastern Seaboard into turmoil. Governor Thomas Mifflin of Pennsylvania issued a proclamation prohibiting all contact between New York City and Philadelphia by land or water, on pain of a $300 fine. When Mayor Richard Varick of New York presented this news to the city council members, they sent word back to Pennsylvania that “a much greater Degree of general Health prevails in this City at present than is usual at this Season of the Year.” Many people agreed with the city council that Governor Mifflin was overreacting. An anonymous letter “To the Citizens of Philadelphia” that ran in an Albany paper near the middle of September ridiculed the hysteria as akin to the Federalists’ needless anxiety about the French Revolution. “Cousins, we are all popping off here like rotten sheep,” the letter went. “Two hundred carcases have been burned on the Battery—500 hanged for fear of catching the Yellow Fever, and about 35 or 40 guillotined—all the windows in town are broken by the firing of cannon—several of our seven story houses have fallen down slam bang of their own accord—Federall hall has got a case of the fidgets, and two yearling pigs have died of the measles—pray send us about 100,000 dollars, to stop the contagion.”

  But the bravado masked tragedy. As the death toll mounted during the month of September, New Yorkers closed their shops and traded horror stories. Elihu Hubbard Smith heard a story about an Irishman who was found dead and alone on the floor of his house after his family had abandoned him in his last hours of agony. “This destructive Terror, this malady of the mind,” Smith wrote in his diary, is “a thousand times more dreadful & pernicious than all corporeal evils.” Still, no one knew how the disease was transmitted or how to save those who fell ill. Some doctors, Smith among them, chose to follow Rush’s methods. At the hospital, Hosack saw the blood of the city’s poor running down their arms and dripping off their fingers into bowls. He hesitated to pick up a lancet himself, afraid he would drain his patients of their last energies.

  It wasn’t that he was completely opposed to bloodletting. But when a body was already wracked by illness, Hosack’s instincts told him that blood loss would give more power to the fever, not less. Better to keep flesh, bone, and blood safely encased in skin. The trick, he thought, would be to stimulate the circulation and help the patient sweat out the fever. In sickrooms around the city, Hosack began washing limbs and torsos with cold vinegar and water, then wrapping them tightly in blankets. He held cups of pungent liquid to cracked, puffy lips. The burnt bitterness of spiritus mindereri, made from acetic acid and ammonia. Tangy tamarind water from the tamarind tree (Tamarindus indica) of the African tropics. A touch of Virginia snakeroot (Aristolochia serpentaria), poisonous in high doses but a safe and powerful diaphoretic—sweat-inducer—if diluted. Gradually, the fever released its hold on Hosack’s patients. The tongue would not hatch the telltale black crust, the eyes would not go glassy and blank. Hosack was jubilant. “When I find my patient sweating within a few hours after the attack of the disease, I congratulate him as secure from danger.” There is still no cure for yellow fever today. Hosack’s approach was probably most beneficial for what it did not do—weaken a patient with blood loss just as their internal organs were threatened with collapse.

  As autumn wore on, the deaths began tapering off. Shopkeepers opened their doors and the streets once again teemed with carriages and horsecarts. One of Hosack’s students, Alexander Anderson, who was ministering to patients out in the countryside, received a cheerful note from his mother in the city reporting that “some of our acquaintance had just returned to town & by way of thankfullness to their Maker—for theirs & our preservation from the great calamity as they called it—they had got themselves compleatly Drunk.”

  THE WORST HAD PASSED for the city, but not for Hosack. On a clear, mild day the following February, Kitty died in childbirth. The baby died, too, leaving Hosack all alone. It must have struck him as a bleak, wintry defeat. He had been out of the country when Alexander died, but even his presence and his clinical skills had not been able to save Kitty and her second baby. Hosack channeled his helplessness into a new professional focus on obstetrics, painting vivid scenes in his Columbia lectures of the overwhelming chaos of childbirth. He told his students that before they entered the delivery room, they must possess complete mental mastery of the birthing process. Once there, they would have “no time for much reflexion much less for consulting books.” He told them it was a matter of life and death that they memorize everything about the reproductive organs—“not merely the soft parts” but also “the structure and configuration of the bones of the pelvis.” He argued that childbirth so fully engaged the whole female body “by means of its membranes, nerves, and blood vessels” that giving birth was “almost one of the vital functions,” like breathing and circulation. He told his students that the physician must radiate confidence both “to yourself” and “to your patient or her friends” because the least uncertainty “manifested by you is observed by them.” They should speak to the mother in a calm, respectful tone while at the same time taking charge.

  Hosack believed that every woman, rich or poor, deserved good obstetric care. He began to think about founding a “lying-in” hospital, devoted to helping women give birth safely even if they could not afford to have a doctor making regular house calls. If a doctor’s own wife and baby couldn’t survive childbirth, what was happening in the almshouse, in the boardinghouses, and in all the miserable shacks at the edges of the city?

  Only two weeks after Kitty’s death, Hosack was nominated to be t
he new professor of materia medica at Columbia. He would now be teaching courses on both materia medica and botany, which he thought was a perfect combination, given the importance of botany to medicine. He also joined the staff of the New-York Hospital. He threw himself into his work at the college, at the hospital, and in his private practice. Following Rush’s example, he avoided liquor, chose his diet carefully, rose early, and worked late—all to double the hours of his usefulness. He would later remark that people who drank too much and ate a meat-heavy diet “dig their graves with their teeth.”

  But no matter how hard Hosack worked, he was only one man. Mothers across the city continued to bleed to death in their birthing beds; entire families died of contagion at the almshouse five minutes’ walk from Columbia. He needed an army of doctors, and he was going to muster and drill them in College Hall. Every restless student in Hosack’s classroom who stilled himself, suddenly alert, to ponder the theories of Rush on yellow fever, of John Hunter on digestion—there was a potential new recruit. Hosack would unleash these young men, generation by generation, on the enemies: injury, disease, premature death. “If we except the art of war, there is certainly no other profession which calls for the same promptness in the exercise of the understanding,” he told them.

  Saliva, bile, semen. Tears, milk, blood. Hosack initiated his students into the animal fluids and the suspended, stewing mass of organs that depended on their healthy circulation and secretion. The students memorized the tree-branch tracery of the blood vessels, learned the heft and texture of heart, intestine, and bone. They discovered that their teacher had an insatiable curiosity about human bodies, including his own. “Dr. H.,” a student jotted down in his notebook, “remarks that frequently after a hearty dinner, when he has found his mind heavy and dull, and disinclined to an effort, he has lost a few ounces of blood from the arm and experienced immediately a happy elasticity of mind.”