An American Plague

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An American Plague Page 6

by Jim Murphy


  Girard’s task was even more daunting. First, the interior of the mansion had to be cleaned from top to bottom. Patients were then put in separate rooms, with the dying in one, the “very low” in another, and so on. Every room and hallway had at least one assigned nurse, most of whom were volunteers from the Free African Society; and because delirious patients sometimes wandered off, a doorkeeper was stationed at the entrance to keep track of who came and went.

  Setting up such an organized hospital was hard enough; keeping it operating was even more difficult. As a hot, humid September limped along, the death rate in the city leaped to over sixty a day, and more and more wretchedly ill people were shipped off to Bush Hill, often in the final stages of sickness. The number of patients rose as the fever raged on, with as many as 140 crammed into the mansion.

  Blind in his right eye, Stephen Girard still took on the formidable task of administering what went on inside the Bush Hill hospital. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)

  To handle the increase in patients, the committee ordered that a new structure be built to accommodate them. In the space of four days, a house sixty feet long and eighteen feet wide was erected, complete with two chimneys. Another structure was quickly assembled to store empty coffins and serve as a morgue.

  The strain and pressure of operating Bush Hill might have driven less dedicated individuals to give up or ask for replacements. Helm and Girard stayed at their posts. Girard even helped care for patients. One anonymous witness was astonished by Girard’s dedication and compassion, noting, “I even saw one of the diseased . . . [discharge] the contents of his stomach upon [him]. What did Girard then do? . . . He wiped the patient’s cloaths, comforted [him] . . . arranged the bed, [and] inspired with courage, by renewing in him the hope that he should recover.—From him he went to another, that vomited offensive matter that would have disheartened any other than this wonderful man.”

  In a matter of days Bush Hill was put into decent operating order, and the spirits of the patients began to improve. But both Helm and Girard knew that one more element was needed if the hospital was to succeed: a full-time physician.

  Once again, a dedicated individual came to the rescue. On September 16 a thirty-nine-year-old doctor and recent arrival to the city volunteered. His name was Jean Devèze.

  It’s very likely that Girard had a hand in getting Dr. Devèze to volunteer just when he needed him. Like Girard, Dr. Devèze was French; like Girard, he did not believe the fever was contagious; and like Girard, he did not believe in the Rush cure. Girard had condemned the extreme bleeding and purging as a “pernicious treatment” that “sent many of our citizens to another world.”

  At first there was some hesitation in the committee over hiring a French doctor. It would seem like a slap at all American doctors, and especially at Dr. Rush. The American doctors who had already failed the Bush Hill patients were so upset that they even promised to show up more regularly. The situation required several days of wrangling and discussions, but in the end Girard and Dr. Devèze won out.

  Dr. Devèze had not only seen and treated yellow fever while living in the West Indies, he had contracted it twice. His treatment was cautious and gentle. Small amounts of sweetened wine would be given to a patient to stimulate the blood; quinine would be administered. For nourishment patients were given “veal or chicken broth, creamed rice, and tapioca.” Some patients were bled, though only in very small amounts.

  Let the body do its own healing. Dr. Devèze was saying. Clean up the patient and sickroom to remove noxious odors. Provide tea and broth and nontoxic medicine to help the body fight off the fever.

  As conditions at the hospital improved, so did its reputation as a place of healing. When Helm and Girard took over, no one in the city wanted to be taken to Bush Hill, fearing it was a death sentence. By the end of September everything had changed. “No sooner was a Person affected with a headache,” Dr. William Annan observed, “than he became anxious to be removed to Bushhill Hospital.”

  Despite growing evidence that the “French cure” was effective in keeping patients alive, it still came in for wide criticism. Benjamin Rush attacked the mild methods used by Jean Devèze and others, even though he had no real statistics to back his claims. “The French physicians are every where getting into disrepute,” the increasingly combative Rush asserted. “They have . . . destroyed at least two thirds of all who have perished by the disorder.”

  Peter Helm, Stephen Girard, Dr. Devèze, and all the nurses and attendants did their best to ignore the controversy and labored on. And every day their fame grew. Later an anonymous author would issue An Account of . . . the Malignant Fever. In it, the writer detailed the amazing work and dedication that brought order and cleanliness to Bush Hill and included special praise for the two managers: “What rewards do these men deserve? who were instrumental in the lives of many! They gave up their own to help the helpless.”

  Bush Hill became a pocket of calm and hope, but it could not cure or comfort the entire population of Philadelphia. The city continued to stagger under the invisible invader’s assault. As the days marched along, burials rose in number, reaching eighty on September 17. Elizabeth Drinker heard more stories of friends who had died, and lamented: “Desolution, Cruelty and Distress have of late resounded in our ears from many quarters.” Even the ever-confident Dr. Rush mourned that “nothing but the power of the Almighty could stop it.”

  As word of the epidemic spread, many towns near Philadelphia closed off communications with the city and placed guards at the entrances to their communities to keep out fever victims. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)

  Inevitably, as Mathew Carey realized, the fear in Philadelphia began to excite “the terror of the inhabitants of all neighboring states.” In New Jersey the cities of Trenton and Lamberton resolved that “a total stop should be put to the landing of all persons from Philadelphia.” The city of Winchester, Virginia, ordered “a guard at every avenue of the town leading from the Potomac, to stop all suspected persons, packages, etc., coming from Philadelphia.”

  Handbills like the one printed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, were printed alerting citizens to “the present alarming State of the MALIGNANT FEVER, which rages in the City of Philadelphia.” Armed patrols scouted country lanes and byways to prevent “diseased and infectious Persons from coming into this Borough.”

  Stagecoaches to and from Philadelphia were stopped; postmasters used tongs to dip mail and newspapers from the city in vinegar and other substances they thought would purify them. Emotions ran high, driven by fear of the unknown. In Milford, Delaware, a Philadelphia woman and her black servant were stopped on the road outside of town. Her wagon and all its contents were burned, and the woman was stripped, tarred and feathered, and, along with her servant, run off. Citizens in another Delaware town refused to allow one ship from Philadelphia to land and take on fresh water, and they attacked and sank another.

  To be sure, some of these towns sent money and other items for Philadelphia’s relief. Manhattan banned ships and travelers from the stricken town and posted guards at all arrival points, but its citizens also sent along $5,000 in aid. Other towns sent livestock, chickens, and carts of vegetables. From the Widow Grubb of Chester, New Jersey, came eighteen bundles of shirts and dresses for the orphans.

  All donations were carefully recorded in a ledger by the committee and put to use. Still, this outpouring of charity could not change a new fact of life. Before the month of September was out, Philadelphians found themselves surrounded by scared and hostile neighbors. Even if they had wanted to flee, escape was now all but impossible.

  The first page of the list of the dead as it appeared in Mathew Carey’s history of the epidemic, 1794. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “This Unmerciful Enemy”

  Death, mounted on his pale horse, seemed to ride triumphant; there was but a step between the people in the city and the tomb.

  —ELHAN
AN WINCHESTER, 1795

  Saturday, October 12. The committee and its many subcommittees were in place and operating smoothly. Problems of every sort were being addressed and solved. Bush Hill had been turned around so thoroughly that people now clamored to be admitted. So many applied that patients had to have a doctor’s certificate stating that they did indeed have yellow fever in order to be let in.

  These efforts certainly had a calming effect on the populace, and the worst of the panic began to ease. But the fever showed no sign of relenting. If anything, it was gaining strength and deadliness. On Monday, October 7, a total of 82 dead were carted away for burial. Ninety died on Friday and 111 on Saturday. Tents were set up at the cemeteries so that gravediggers could rest but never be far from their ceaseless work.

  The Reverend Mr. Helmuth was pondering “this unmerciful enemy” as he made his way through the city. Over the previous six days, 130 of his Lutheran congregation had been carried off, and his church’s tiny burial ground was looking more and more like a plowed field.

  Could it be, he wondered, that Lutherans caught the sickness more readily than Quakers, Methodists, or Catholics? His Lutheran colleague the Reverend John Schmidt had the fever, and his parish gravedigger and the gravedigger’s mother had already succumbed.

  All this calamity surrounded Helmuth, but he stayed in the city and made daily door-to-door visits, cautiously walking deserted streets and abandoned alleyways “with a trembling heart.” House after house was decorated with a tiny red flag, the sign that yellow fever had invaded it. Block after block was empty and still. Those few Philadelphians he encountered shunned him, just as they shunned the black nurses, gravediggers, carters of the dead, doctors, bloodletters, and anyone who worked at or even visited Bush Hill.

  Nighttime was worse. Without the hired lamplighters, most of the city’s 662 whale oil streetlamps remained unlit, the surrounding areas cast into a gloomy darkness. “Such a deep silence reigned in the streets [after nine o’clock],” Helmuth wrote. “I perfectly recollect several visits of the sick, which I had to make, entirely alone, at that time of the night. . . . Houses shut up to the right and left, deserted by their inhabitants, or containing persons struggling in death at that very time, or whose former inhabitants were all dead already.”

  Occasionally the stench of death would fill Helmuth’s nose and demand his attention. On one block of narrow Appletree Alley he counted forty dead. Most often the minister was attracted by the pitiful shrieks and calls of the sick in the final stages of the disease.

  Such distress upset and frightened him, but it also strengthened his conviction that Philadelphia had brought it all on itself. “After such a merry, sinful summer,” he mused, “by the just judgement of God, a most mournful autumn followed.”

  The Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth went through the stricken city to visit numerous stricken parishioners and later wrote an account of the plague. (THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA)

  Helmuth wasn’t the only one who realized that the fever was winning. On October 17 committee member Caleb Lownes wrote in the official minutes: “From the accounts received from different quarters of the city, it is evident that the disorder . . . has for the last week been more general and alarming than at any time since its appearance.”

  Even with his mercury-and-jalap cure in hand, Benjamin Rush looked about him and understood that Philadelphia itself might succumb at any moment. “Not a ray of alleviation of the present calamity breaks in our city from any quarter,” he wrote to Julia. “All is a thick and melancholy gloom.”

  The weather did not help anyone’s spirits. After rain fell on September 9, a warm, deadly dry spell followed, lasting over a month. “Many people . . . looked for rain,” committee member John Bordley noted, “which they believed would be fatal to the infection. Others . . . looked only for mere cold, whether attended by rain or not, because histories of this fever assured them that cold had always been fatal to the infection.”

  Rain finally fell on October 12 and then again on October 15—a steady shower that Philadelphians hoped would clean the air of fatal odors and wash away the foul, disease-causing matter in the streets. Benjamin Rush felt the rain on his face and rejoiced: “The appearance of this rain was like a dove with an olive branch in its mouth.”

  Yet 111 died on October 12, and 103 the next day.

  Clearly, the mysterious killing force was still in Philadelphia, still working its way into households despite every precaution, still infecting at an alarming rate. One man named Collins had lost his entire family—his wife, his two daughters, his son, and his son’s wife and child—early in the plague. He married again and his new wife promptly died. Finally, at the height of the fever, his will to survive gave out. Mr. Collins caught the fever, and a few days later he joined the rest of his family members in the crowded potter’s field.

  More than just the fever was preying on those left in Philadelphia. The crime rate went up, and there was rioting. Few firsthand accounts make mention of the lawbreaking and violence. Apothecary shops were broken into and medicines stolen; food was taken from the few farmer’s wagons to appear in town. The committee decided to ignore the problem—at least on the public record—and concentrate instead on keeping people alive.

  During England’s Black Plague of 1664, many of the dead were buried hastily in mass graves. Similar burials took place in Philadelphia in 1793. (THE COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS OF PHILADELPHIA)

  Benjamin Rush mentions the disruptions in a few brief references, but provides no details. The treasury clerk, Joshua Dawson, did note “fine doings in the River, easy means of smuggling, & most likely, little precaution taken to prevent it.” Outsiders already looked upon Philadelphia as a blighted area. Why, these Philadelphia citizens probably decided, smudge the city’s reputation even further—and possibly drive away future business—with detailed written accounts of looting and violence?

  One thing they did mention was the grasping hand of the landlords. Tenants, made jobless by the fever, ran out of rent money and were turned out of their homes. Even famous and beloved citizens felt the landlord’s bite. One day Benjamin Rush returned home to discover that his landlord (the annoyed owner of Bush Hill, William Hamilton) had raised his rent and was demanding three months’ payment in advance.

  The committee could not stop the evictions, but they did attempt to assist renters with small cash advances. These handouts were not meant to provide long-term assistance but rather to see the individual or family through the week ahead.

  In a few instances the charity only lined the pockets of the greedy. One landlord told the committee that her tenants needed immediate financial help in order to survive and was granted the money requested. After pocketing the money herself, she seized her tenants’ clothing and put everyone out on the street anyway. October seemed to have brought out the very worst in the fever and in many of Philadelphia’s citizens.

  It was during these terrible days that Benjamin Rush once again began to feel weak and feverish. Yellow fever had invaded his body for a second time. And despite his own insistence that his cure needed to be administered at the first signs of fever, he did not have himself bled or purged. He left no explanation for shunning his cure. Perhaps he felt his illness was mild in comparison to his first experience; perhaps one encounter with his cure was enough. Whatever the reason, Rush tried to ignore his condition and carried on his medical practice as best he could, visiting patients from morning to night.

  His joints ached painfully. He had no appetite. And his terrible night sweats returned. When he did manage to nod off, his sleep was haunted by “disturbing and frightful dreams. The scenes of them were derived altogether from sick rooms and grave-yards.” Still, he rose every morning and set off on his mission, often dressed in the same tattered and soiled clothes he had worn the day before.

  He collapsed in a patient’s room on October 4 and had to be carried home. He was up again two days later, but the yellow fever would not relent. He faint
ed again on October 9. Finally, he took his own cure once more.

  “It puked me several times,” he would record, “[and] next morning it operated downwards, and relieved me.” This time, however, Rush did not rebound so quickly. He was confined to his bed, unable even to raise his head, for six straight days, during the absolute peak of the fever.

  It did not seem that the situation could get much worse. Then reports began to filter in that the fever had appeared in the “out parts” of Philadelphia, what we would call the suburbs. Communities such as Frankford, Southwark, and the Northern Liberties trembled as cases appeared among them despite their efforts to keep it out. The plague seemed truly unstoppable.

  There wasn’t much anyone could do except carry on as best as possible. The committee continued to operate and solve problems; patients were cared for at Bush Hill; members of the Free African Society went door to door offering assistance; the few remaining doctors administered whatever medical attention they thought might work; and quacks offered a variety of home-brewed powders and teas.

  The city government did not keep accurate records of yearly births and deaths and relied on information supplied by local churches. The number of deaths since August in this bill of mortality is given as just over 5,000, a very accurate estimate of the toll yellow fever took in 1793. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)

  Philip Freneau chose to combat the plague with denial and humor. As editor of the National Gazette, Freneau struggled as much to keep his paper in operation as he did to avoid the fever. Because supplies had become scarce after week two of the plague, Freneau had a hard time finding paper. Instead of the usual four to eight pages, he was often forced to publish a single sheet.

 

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