Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic of 1793

Philadelphia had about 50,000 people in 1793 when yellow fever spread through it. Everyone who could afford to leave did, George Washington and other officials among them, and within a month of the fever's arrival the city, state and federal governments had almost stopped functioning. On 10 September Mayor Matthew Clarkson appealed for volunteers. A committee met daily at City Hall from 14 September to 27 November to arrange care for the sick, bury the dead and look after orphans. It took over a makeshift hospital at Bush Hill, found it dirty and disordered, and put two volunteers, Stephen Girard and Peter Helm, in charge.

Physicians quarreled over cause and cure. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, blamed miasma, impure air arising in the city itself, and treated patients with heavy bleeding, purging and large doses of mercury. Alexander Hamilton, the Treasury Secretary, blamed refugees from Santo Domingo, favored closing the ports and backed the gentler bark and wine cure. Neither treatment worked well, and the choice between them became a matter of party.

Rush and others urged Black Philadelphians to nurse the sick, in the mistaken belief that people of African descent were immune. Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, leaders of the Free African Society, organized nurses, carters and gravediggers, and Rush taught them when to bleed and how to give his medicines. Many fell ill; on some days four or five Black Philadelphians were taken for burial. More than 5,000 people died in all.

When Mathew Carey, whose account of the epidemic ran through several editions, accused Black nurses of extortion and plunder, Jones and Allen answered in 1794 with A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People. They wrote that they had buried several hundred poor people and strangers without asking for payment, and that as many whites as Blacks had been caught pilfering, although Black nurses outnumbered white ones twenty to one.