by Jim Murphy
A description of the social and economic structure of Philadelphia.
Davis, Allen F., and Mark H. Haller, eds. The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-Class Life, 1790–1940. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973.
Nice explanation of how Philadelphia’s narrow streets and alleys came into existence, plus a look at crime at the end of the eighteenth century and Israel Israel’s stolen election. Chapters on many ethnic groups as well.
Driver, Clive E., ed. Passing Through: Letters and Documents Written in Philadelphia by Famous Visitors. Philadelphia: The Rosenbach Museum & Library, 1982.
Hardie, James. The Philadelphia Directory and Register . . . . , 2nd edition. Philadelphia: Jacob Johnson, 1794.
For 62½ cents you could buy an alphabetical listing of every resident of Philadelphia, which included a job description and address. One entry reads: “Washington George, President of the United States, 190, High St.”
Latrobe, Benjamin Henry. View of the Practicability and Means of Supplying the City of Philadelphia with Wholesome Water. Philadelphia: Zachariah Poulson, Jr., Printer, 1799.
Looney, Robert F. Old Philadelphia in Early Photographs, 1839–1914. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1976.
While obviously none of these photographs depict scenes from 1793, they do evoke a sense of a city made up of brick and slate and very narrow alleyways.
Miller, Richard G. Philadelphia—The Federalist City: A Study of Urban Politics, 1789–1801. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1976.
Thompson, Peter. Rum Punch & Revolution: Taverngoing & Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
According to Thompson, news could travel around Philadelphia faster by way of tavern gossip than via the newspapers. Among the favorite spots in town were the London Coffee House (which served more than just coffee), the Pennypot Tavern, and the Man Full of Trouble Tavern.
Warner, Sam Bass, Jr. The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Growth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968.
How the average person spent his or her day, plus a detailed look at the development of the water system.
Weigley, Russell F., ed. Philadelphia: A 300-Year History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982.
Wildes, Harry Emerson. Lonely Midas: The Story of Stephen Girard. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. Inc., 1943.
GEORGE WASHINGTON AND HIS PROBLEMS
Abbot, W. W., and Dorothy Twohig, eds. The Papers of George Washington: The Journal of the Proceedings of the President, 1793–1797. Charlottesville, Va.: The University Press of Virginia, 1981.
Freeman, Douglas Southall. George Washington: A Biography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948–57.
This is a series of volumes, seven in all, that covers just about every aspect of George Washington’s life, including his problems with Edmond Genêt and his concern over calling Congress into session during Philadelphia’s yellow fever epidemic.
Jackson, Donald, and Dorothy Twohig, eds. The Diaries of George Washington. Vol. VI, January 1790–December 1799. Charlottesville, Va.: The University Press of Virginia, 1979.
Pickering, Timothy. Letter to George Washington, October 28, 1793. Original in the Library of Congress.
Randolph, Edmund. Letter to George Washington, October 26, 1793. Original in the Library of Congress.
Trumball, Jonathan. Letter to George Washington, October 31, 1793. Original in the Library of Congress.
Washington, George. Letters of 1793: to Alexander Hamilton, September 25 and October 14; to Thomas Sim Lee, October 13; to Jonathan Trumball, October 13; to Oliver Wolcott, October 14; to James Madison, October 14; to Timothy Pickering, October 14; to Edmund Randolph, October 14 and October 23; to Henry Knox, October 15. Originals in the Library of Congress.
BLACKS IN PHILADELPHIA
Allen, Richard. Life, Experience and Gospel Labours. Philadelphia: Martin and Boden. Printers, 1833.
Allen recounts the incident where white members of St. George’s tried to make him and other blacks sit in the back of the church and how this prompted him to organize his own church.
Douglass, William. Annals of the First African Church, in the United States of America, Now Styled the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, Philadelphia. . . . Philadelphia: King & Baird, 1862.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965.
Hornsby, Alton, Jr. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1991.
Does not mention the yellow fever epidemic but has information about the lives of Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, as well as specific references to blacks in Philadelphia.
Kaplan, Sidney. The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, 1770–1800. Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society Ltd, and Smithsonian Institution Press, 1973.
Nash, Gary B. Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.
THAT BUZZING IN YOUR EAR
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.
This book alerted a large audience to a variety of environmental problems, spurring changes in our laws affecting the air, land, and water. Still important reading after forty years.
Spielman, Andrew, and Michael D’Antonio. Mosquito: A Natural History of Our Most Persistent and Deadly Foe. New York: Hyperion Books, 2001.
You might not think it from the title, but this is an extremely entertaining and informative book—not to mention scary.
Taubes, Gary. “A Mosquito Bites Back.” The New York Times Magazine, August 24, 1997.
Essentially, this article tells you that mosquitoes are out there and dangerous and it won’t be long before they’re living in your backyard.
OTHER PLAGUES
Here is a list of books dealing with a variety of killer diseases. Some of them are transmitted by mosquitoes, some by other insects, such as ticks and fleas, and still others through person-to-person contact. The one thing they all have in common is that they are deadly.
Bourdain, Anthony. Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001.
How a cook named Mary Mallon gave this deadly disease to the people she worked for and then led health officials and police on a lively chase.
Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year. Harmondsworth, Great Britain: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1966.
I love reading about the bubonic plague, sometimes called the Black Death. While this book is fictional in nature, it is tilled with a great deal of information about day-to-day life with death all around you.
Duffy, John. Epidemics in Colonial America. Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1953.
What our ancestors suffered.
Fenn, Elizabeth A. Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1773–82. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.
What Native Americans and the Continental soldiers under George Washington suffered.
Garrett, Laurie. The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.
What we and our children will suffer.
Giblin, James Cross. When Plague Strikes: The Black Death, Smallpox, AIDS. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995.
A wonderfully written look at three epidemics and how people and doctors reacted in times of fear and uncertainty.
Hays, J. N. The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History. New Brunswick. N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
A sweeping history of many of the world’s most deadly diseases and their effects on society.
Kohn, George C., ed. Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence. New York: Facts on File. Inc., 1995.
An A-to-Z history of many different plagues from many different places around the world.
Kraut, Alan M. Silent Travelers: Germ
s, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace.” Baltimore. Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Many ailments are covered here, with emphasis on how the accompanying fear and panic have often resulted in oppression of helpless groups of people.
McNeill, William H. Plagues and Peoples. New York: History Book Club, 1993.
How a variety of epidemics have shaped human history.
Oldstone, Michael B. A. Viruses, Plagues, & History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
A history of a number of the “old” diseases, including yellow fever, as well as many of the newer scourges, such as Ebola, HIV/AIDS, and mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy).
Porter, Stephen. The Great Plague. Trowbridge. Great Britain: Redwood Books, 2000.
Presents the bubonic plague as it kills off over 70,000 Londoners in 1665, and thousands more in the suburbs. Contains some marvelously grim illustrations.
Rosenberg, Charles E. The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Rosner, David, ed. Hires of Sickness: Public Health and Epidemics in New York City. New Brunswick. N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995.
As New York City grew larger and larger in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many epidemics, including yellow fever, followed.
Shilts, Randy. And the Hand Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.
A chilling history of this modern-day disease.
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.
Compares and contrasts the nineteenth-century view of tuberculosis with ours of cancer.
Wills, Christopher. Yellow Fever/Black Goddess: The Coevolution of People and Plagues. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1996.
Despite the title, there is hardly a mention of yellow fever in this book. But it contains other killer diseases, such as the Black Death, cholera, typhus, and HIV/AIDS. The caption to a Thomas Nast illustration notes that this famous political cartoonist died of yellow fever while visiting Ecuador in 1902.
Zinsser, Hans. Rats, Lice and History: Being a Study in Biography, which, after Twelve Preliminary Chapters Indispensable for the Preparation of the Lay Reader, Deals With the Life History of Typhus Fever. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 1963.
A lighthearted but fact-filled “biography” of typhus fever, with mention of many other fevers and topics, including how yellow fever has been seen to mutate and become even more deadly.
Acknowledgments
The idea for this book began to take shape more than six years ago, when I came across a copy of John H. Powell’s Bring Out Your Dead. Reading this book was a revelation, not just because of the depth of scholarship, but because Powell brought the time alive in a powerful and emotional way. I’ve discovered since that no one writes about the Philadelphia epidemic—no one writes about yellow fever, period!—without relying heavily on this work, and that includes me.
Many people helped me gather information for my text and hunt out appropriate illustrations, and I’d like to thank them for their invaluable assistance: Karie Diethorn, Chief, Museum Branch, Independence National Historical Park; Carol Wotowicz Smith, Historian, The National Grange Mutual Insurance Company/The Green Tree Collection; Stacy Bomento, Rights and Reproductions Department, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Leslie A. Morris, Curator of Manuscripts, and Tom Ford, Public Services, The Houghton Library, Harvard University; Barbara Katus, Registrar, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Laura E. Beardsley, Head of Graphics, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Cathy Grophes, The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum.
I would also like to thank Charles B. Greifenstein, Curator of Archives & Manuscripts, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, for his very good advice concerning medical illustrations. The College also houses the Mutter Museum for Infectious Diseases, where I found a rare first edition of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and the illustration of mass burial. The front section of the museum contains an interesting exhibit on a variety of infectious diseases, including yellow fever. The Mutter Museum also houses a collection of medical oddities from the nineteenth century—such as a piece of John Wilkes Booth’s neck, 139 skulls, and a medicine cabinet filled with sharp objects people swallowed, or at least tried to swallow. And these aren’t the strangest things you’ll see if you visit this museum.
Thanks, too, to Jim Giblin, who suggested I check out Charles Willson Peale and his doings during the fever, and whose own wonderful book about epidemics, When Plague Strikes, both inspired and challenged me to work harder on my project.
Finally, I would also like to thank Nicole H. Scalessa, Connie King, and Valerie Miller of the Library Company of Philadelphia for their skill and patience in helping me locate books, letters, and newspapers from the period. I especially want to acknowledge the patient guidance provided by Philip Lapsansky, Chief of Reference at the Library Company and curator of its Afro-Americana Collection. I still remember the chill that ran through me when he handed me a copy of Absalom Jones and Richard Allen’s A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia and said, “This is the actual copy of the Narrative Jones and Allen donated to the Library Company in 1794.” Reading about our nation’s history is one thing; actually holding it in your hands is something altogether different.
A Note About the Illustrations
Philadelphia in 1793 had a number of talented artists and engravers, including Charles Willson Peale and William Birch, plus a great many printers, and a public eager to know what happened to their city during the yellow fever epidemic. Many books and pamphlets were published about the epidemic, but it seems that no one ever documented it visually. “In fact,” Charles Greifenstein, Curator of Archives & Manuscripts at the College of Physicians, told me, “there are very few medical images of any kind from around 1750 until the mid-nineteenth century. Not even of something as common as bleeding.”
It’s possible that the 1793 plague was so traumatic and the pain so fresh that artists steered clear of it out of respect for the dead and their loved ones. Or maybe they felt the city’s image had already taken enough of a beating via the written word. It’s also possible that medical practices were so familiar to the general public that images of them were considered redundant. Still, it would have been interesting to peek through the curtain of time and actually see what the streets of Philadelphia were like as Benjamin Rush hurried to a patient’s bedside or the Reverend Mr. Helmuth visited yet another sick member of his congregation.
I’ve tried to include images that will help readers imagine what the city was like back then—the narrow streets, the press of people, and so on. I’ve also included pictures from Europe to show bloodletting, a typical epidemic scene, and mass burial.
The one illustration I wish I could have included was done by Dr. Carlos Finlay, the Cuban physician who published his theory that mosquitoes might be the cause of yellow fever twenty years before Walter Reed’s commission proved it. Finlay always felt he was not given proper credit for his work and spent many years fighting to establish his contribution. His painting (which can be found on page 57 of Michael Oldstone’s Viruses, Plagues, & History) shows Walter Reed, James Carroll, and Jesse Lazear in a small but very pleasant office with lush, tropical vegetation just outside the door. Finlay has also painted himself into this picture, a somewhat sad way to include himself in the history of yellow fever.
Index
Note: Bold type refers to illustrations.
Adams, John, [>]–[>], [>], [>]
Adams, Thomas Boylston, [>]
Address of M. Carey to the Public, The (Carey), [>]
Aedes aegypti mosquito, [>], [>], [>]–[>]
Agramonte, Aristides, [>]
Allen, Richard, [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>]–[>]
Amelia (ship), [>]–[>]
American Museum, The, [>]
American Revolution:
financing of, [>]–[>]
French support of, [>], [>]
local support of, [>]
An Account of . . . the Malignant Fever (anon.), [>]–[>]
Annan, William, [>]
Army, U.S., Yellow Fever Commission, [>]
Asian tiger mosquito, [>]
Aston, Peter, [>]
Atabrine, [>]
bacteria, [>], [>], [>]
Benge, Samuel, [>]
Biddle, Charles, [>]–[>]
bile, [>]
Black Plague (England), [>]
blisters, [>]
blood, [>]
bloodletting, [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>], [>]
Bonaparte, Napoleon, [>]
Bordley, John, [>]
Boyles, Thomas, [>]
Bradford, William, [>]
brandy, [>], [>]
Brown, Andrew, [>], [>], [>]
Bush Hill, [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>]
Bustill, Cyrus, [>]
Caldwell, Charles, [>], [>]
camphor, [>]
cannons, firing, [>]
Carey, Mathew, [>]
book by, [>]–[>], [>]–[>]
events described by, [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>]–[>], [>]
lists of the dead by, [>