The 1793 Yellow Fever Plague in Philadelphia

I've been reading John Harvey Powell's book, Bring Out Your Dead, which is a vivid account of the Yellow Fever Plague in Philadelphia in 1793. It makes the Covid-19 pandemic look pretty tame by comparison, but there are also fascinating parallels. Philadelphia was the nation's capital at that time, so this was a big deal. The disease was horrible. The patient  turned yellow, vomited putrid, black bile, had unrelenting diarrhea, suffered terribly before dying. Medical science at that time was pre-germ theory, and no one knew that mosquitoes were transmitting the disease. Doctors disagreed vehemently on how a patient should be treated. Some, like Benjamin Rush, urged aggressive purges of the stomach and extreme blood-letting. Others favored herbal teas and fresh air! Nothing worked very well and the death rate was high. Scores died every day and fear gripped the population. It was widely believed that to touch or even be near someone with the disease would cause you to get it, so even spouses and children were literally abandoned and left to die alone. Hundreds died in the streets. No one wanted to handle the corpses. African-Americans (both slaves and freemen) were believed by whites to be immune to the disease (they weren't), so they were ordered to dispose of corpses. It's an amazing story that seems to be largely forgotten in today's discussions. You hear a lot about the 1918 flu epidemic, but nothing about 1793. I got the book through the Internet Archive. It isn't a delightful read - it's pretty grim - but it is very interesting. The author, by the way, was a personal friend of Ellen's father, Frederick Tolles. That is how I came to be aware of this book.

The opening pages of Bring Out Your Dead