An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the
Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 (Newbery Honor Book)
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Map
No One Noticed
“All Was Not Right”
Church Bells Tolling
Confusion, Distress, and Utter Desolation
“It Was Our Duty”
The Prince of Bleeders
“By Twelve Only”
“This Unmerciful Enemy”
“A Delicate Situation”
Improvements and the Public Gratitude
“A Modern-Day Time Bomb”
Sources
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Illustrations
Index
About the Author
COPYRIGHT
Copyright © 2003 by Jim Murphy
All rights reserved.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South,
New York, NY 10003.
Clarion Books
215 Park Avenue South
New York, NY 10003
www.hmhco.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Murphy, Jim
An American plague : the true and terrifying story of the yellow fever
epidemic of 1793 / by Jim Murphy,
p, cm.
1. Yellow fever—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—History—18th century—
Juvenile literature. [1. Yellow fever—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—History
—18th century. 2. Pennsylvania—History—1775–1865.] 1. Title.
RA644.Y4 M875 2003
614.5'41'097481109033—dc21 2002151355
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0395776087
eISBN: 978-0547532851
v1.0914
For Mike and Ben—my wonderful, at-home germ
machines. This one’s for you!
With love, Dad
From James Hardie’s Philadelphia Directory and Register, 1793. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF
PHILADELPHIA)
CHAPTER ONE
No One Noticed
About this time, this destroying scourge, the malignant
fever, crept in among us.
—MATHEW CAREY. NOVEMBER 1793
Saturday, August 3, 1793. The sun came up, as it had every day since the
end of May, bright, hot, and unrelenting. The swamps and marshes south of
Philadelphia had already lost a great deal of water to the intense heat, while
the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers had receded to reveal long stretches of
their muddy, root-choked banks. Dead fish and gooey vegetable matter were
exposed and rotted, while swarms of insects droned in the heavy, humid air.
In Philadelphia itself an increasing number of cats were dropping dead
every day, attracting, one Philadelphian complained, “an amazing number
of flies and other insects.” Mosquitoes were everywhere, though their high-
pitched whirring was particularly loud near rain barrels, gutters, and open
sewers.
These sewers, called “sinks,” were particularly ripe this year. Most streets
in the city were unpaved and had no system of covered sewers and pipes to
channel water away from buildings. Instead, deep holes were dug at various
street corners to collect runoff water and anything else that might be washed
along. Dead animals were routinely tossed into this soup, where everything
decayed and sent up noxious bubbles to foul the air.
Down along the docks lining the Delaware, cargo was being loaded onto
ships that would sail to New York, Boston, and other distant ports. The hard
work of hoisting heavy casks into the hold was accompanied by the
stevedores’ usual grunts and muttered oaths.
The ferryboat (right) from Camden, New Jersey, has just arrived at the busy Arch Street dock. (THE
HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA)
The men laboring near Water Street had particular reason to curse. The
sloop Amelia from Santo Domingo had anchored with a cargo of coffee,
which had spoiled during the voyage. The bad coffee was dumped on Ball’s
Wharf, where it putrefied in the sun and sent out a powerful odor that could
be smelled over a quarter mile away. Benjamin Rush, one of Philadelphia’s
most celebrated doctors and a signer of the Declaration of Independence,
lived three long blocks from Ball’s Wharf, but he recalled that the coffee
stank “to the great annoyance of the whole neighborhood.”
Despite the stench, the streets nearby were crowded with people that
morning—ship owners and their captains talking seriously, shouting
children darting between wagons or climbing on crates and barrels, well-
dressed men and women out for a stroll, servants and slaves hurrying from
one chore to the next. Philadelphia was then the largest city in North
America, with nearly 51,000 inhabitants; those who didn’t absolutely have
to be indoors working had escaped to the open air to seek relief from the
sweltering heat.
Many of them stopped at one of the city’s 415 shops, whose doors and
windows were wide open to let in light and any hint of a cooling breeze.
The rest continued along, headed for the market on High Street.
Here three city blocks were crowded with vendors calling their wares
while eager shoppers studied merchandise or haggled over weights and
prices. Horse-drawn wagons clattered up and down the cobblestone street,
bringing in more fresh vegetables, squawking chickens, and squealing pigs.
People commented on the stench from Ball’s Wharf, but the market’s own
ripe blend of odors—of roasting meats, strong cheeses, days-old sheep and
cow guts, dried blood, and horse manure—tended to overwhelm all others.
One and a half blocks from the market was the handsomely refurbished
mansion of Robert Morris, a wealthy manufacturer who had used his
fortune to help finance the Revolutionary War. Morris was lending this
house to George and Martha Washington and had moved himself into
another, larger one he owned just up the block. Washington was then
president of the United States, and Philadelphia was the temporary capital
of the young nation and the center of its federal government. Washington
spent the day at home in a small, stuffy office seeing visitors, writing
letters, and worrying. It was the French problem that was most on his mind
these days.
Rich and poor do their food shopping along Market Street. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF
PHILADELPHIA)
Not so many years before, the French monarch, Louis XVI, had sent
money, ships, and soldiers to aid the struggling Continental Army’s light
against the British. The French aid had been a major reason why
Washington was able to surround and force General Charles Cornwallis to
surrender at Yorktown in 1781. This military victory eventually led to a
British capitulation three years later and to freedom for the United States—
and lasting fame for Washington.
Then, in 1789, France erupted in its own revolution. The common people
and a few nobles and churchmen soon gained complete power in France
and beheaded Louis XVI in January 1793. Many of France’s neighbors
worried that similar revolutions might spread to their countries and wanted
the new French republic crushed. Soon after the king was put to death,
revolutionary France was at war with Great Britain, Holland, Spain, and
Austria.
Naturally, the French republic had turned to the United States for help,
only to have President Washington hesitate. Washington knew that he and
his country owed the French an eternal debt. He simply wasn’t sure that the
United States had the military strength to take on so many formidable foes.
Many citizens felt Washington’s Proclamation of Neutrality was a
betrayal of the French people. His own secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson,
certainly did, and he argued bitterly with Treasury Secretary Alexander
Hamilton over the issue. Wasn’t the French fight for individual freedom,
Jefferson asked, exactly like America’s struggle against British oppression?
The situation was made worse in April by the arrival of the French
republic’s new minister, Edmond Charles Genêt. Genêt’s first action in the
United States was to hire American privateers, privately owned and manned
ships, to attack and plunder British ships in the name of his government. He
then traveled to Philadelphia to ask George Washington to support his
efforts. Washington gave Genêt what amounted to a diplomatic cold
shoulder, meeting with him very briefly, but refusing to discuss the subject
of United States support of the French. But a large number of United States
citizens loved Genêt and the French cause and rallied around him.
Pro-French sympathies were further heightened in July by the sudden
influx of 2,100 French refugees, who were fleeing a fierce slave rebellion in
Santo Domingo. Pro-French demonstrations were held near the president’s
home and escalated in intensity. Vice President John Adams was extremely
nervous about this “French Madness” and recalled that “ten thousand
people in the streets of Philadelphia . . . threatened to drag Washington out
of his house, and effect a revolution in the government or compel it to
declare war in favor of the French Revolution.”
While Washington worried, the city’s taverns, beer gardens, and
coffeehouses—all 176 of them—were teeming with activity that Saturday.
There men, and a few women, lifted their glasses in toasts and singing and
let the hours slip away in lively conversation. Business and politics and the
latest gossip were the favorite topics. No doubt the heat, the foul stink from
Ball’s Wharf, and the country’s refusal to join with France were discussed
and argued over at length.
In all respects it seemed as if August 3 was a very normal day, with
business and buying and pleasure as usual.
Oh, there were a few who felt a tingle of unease. For weeks an unusually
large supply of wild pigeons had been for sale at the market. Popular
folklore suggested that such an abundance of pigeons always brought with
it unhealthy air and sickness.
Dr. Rush had no time for such silly notions, but he, too, sensed that
something odd was happening. His concern focused on a series of illnesses
that had struck his patients throughout the year—the mumps in January, jaw
and mouth infections in February, scarlet fever in March, followed by
influenza in July. “There was something in the heat and drought,” the good
doctor speculated, “which was uncommon, in their influence upon the
human body.”
A group of well-to-do men gather at the City Tavern to drink, smoke their pipes, and talk away the
afternoon. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)
The Reverend J. Henry C. Helmuth of the Lutheran congregation, too,
thought something was wrong in the city, though it had nothing to do with
sickness of the body. It was the souls of its citizens he worried about.
“Philadelphia . . . seemed to strive to exceed all other places in the breaking
of the Sabbath,” he noted. An increasing number of people shunned church
and went instead to the taverns, where they drank and gambled; too many
others spent their free time in theaters which displayed “rope-dancing and
other shows.” Sooner or later, he warned, the city would feel God’s
displeasure.
Rush and Helmuth would have been surprised to know that their worries
were turning to reality on August 3. For on that Saturday a young French
sailor rooming at Richard Denny’s boarding house, over on North Water
Street, was desperately ill with a fever. Eighteenth-century record keeping
wasn’t very precise, so no one bothered to write down his name. Besides,
this sailor was poor and a foreigner, not the sort of person who would draw
much attention from the community around him. All we know is that his
fever worsened and was accompanied by violent seizures, and that a few
days later he died.
One of the many narrow, forgotten alleys of Philadelphia. (THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF
PENNSYLVANIA)
Other residents at Denny’s would follow this sailor to the grave—a Mr.
Moore fell into a stupor and passed away, Mrs. Richard Parkinson expired
on August 7, next the lodging house owner and his wife, Mary, and then the
first sailor’s roommate. Around the same time, two people in the house next
to Denny’s died of the same severe fever.
Eight deaths in the space of a week in two houses on the same street . . .
but the city did not take notice. Summer fevers were common visitors to all
American cities in the eighteenth century, and therefore not headline news.
Besides, Denny’s was located on a narrow out-of-the-way street—really
more an alley than a street. “It is much confined,” a resident remarked, “ill-
aired, and, in every respect, is a disagreeable street.” Things happened
along this street all the time—sometimes very bad things—that went
unnoticed by the authorities and the rest of the population.
So the deaths did not disrupt Philadelphia much at all. Ships came and
went; men and women did chores, talked, and sought relief from the heat
and insects; the markets and shops hummed with activity; children played;
and the city, state, and federal governments went about their business.
No one noticed that the church bells were tolling more often than usual to
announce one death, and then another. They rang for Dr. Hugh Hodge’s
little daughter, for Peter Aston, for John Weyman, for Mary Shewell, and
for a boy named McNair. No one knew that a killer was already moving
through their streets with them, an invisible stalker that would go house to
house until it had touched everyone, rich or poor, in some terrible way.
From The Federal Gazette, August 23, 1793. (THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA)
CHAPTER TWO
“All Was Not Right”
8 or 10 persons buried out of Water St, between Race
and Arch Sts.; many sick in our neighborhood, and in
ye City generally.
—ELIZABETH DRINKER, AUGUST 21, 1793
Monday, August 19. It was clear that thirty-three-year-old Catherine
LeMaigre was dying, and dying horribly and painfully. Between agonized
gasps and groans she muttered that her stomach felt as if it were burning up.
Every ten minutes or so her moaning would stop abruptly and she would
vomit a foul black bile.
Her husband, Peter, called in two neighborhood doctors to save his young
wife. One was Dr. Hugh Hodge, whose own daughter had been carried off
by the same fever just days before. Hodge had been an army surgeon during
the Revolutionary War, and while stubborn and crusty in his ways, he was a
respected physician. The other was Dr. John Foulke, who was a fellow of
Philadelphia’s prestigious College of Physicians and a member of the
Pennsylvania Hospital board.
Hodge and Foulke did what they could for their patient. They gave her
cool drinks of barley water and apple water to reduce the fever, and red
wine with laudanum to help her rest. Her forehead, face, and arms were
washed regularly with damp cloths.
Nothing worked, and Catherine LeMaigre’s condition worsened. Her
pulse slowed, her eyes grew bloodshot, her skin took on the pale-yellow
color that gave the disease its name. More black vomit came spewing forth.
In desperation, the two physicians sent for their esteemed colleague Dr.
Benjamin Rush.
Rush was forty-seven years old and so highly respected that he was often
called in by colleagues when they were baffled by a case. His medical
training had been extensive, consisting of five years of apprenticeship with
the pre-eminent doctor in the United States, John Redman. After this he had
gone to Europe to study under the most skilled surgeons and doctors in the
western world.
He was passionate and outspoken in his beliefs, no matter what the
subject. He opposed slavery, felt that alcohol and tobacco should be
avoided, urged that the corporal punishment of children be stopped, and
thought that the best way to keep a democracy strong was by having
universal education. Along with his beliefs went an unimaginable amount
of energy. Despite a persistent cough and weak lungs that often left him
gasping for air, he worked from early in the morning until late at night—
writing letters and papers, visiting patients, reading the latest medical
literature, or attending to any one of a number of institutions and charities
he belonged to.
Hodge and Foulke told Rush about Catherine LeMaigre’s symptoms and
what they had done to help her. There was nothing much else they could do.
Rush said, after the three men left her bedchamber to discuss the case. Rush
then noted that in recent days he had seen “an unusual number of bilious
fevers, accompanied with symptoms of uncommon malignity.” In a grave
voice, his seriousness reflected in his intense blue eyes, he added that “all
was not right in our city.”
The two other doctors agreed, and then all three recounted the symptoms
they had seen. The sickness began with chills, headache, and a painful
aching in the back, arms, and legs. A high fever developed, accompanied by
constipation. This stage lasted around three days, and then the fever
suddenly broke and the patient seemed to recover.
But only for a few short hours.
The next stage saw the fever shoot up again. The skin and eyeballs turned
yellow, as red blood cells were destroyed, causing the bile pigment bilirubin
to accumulate in the body; nose, gums, and intestines began bleeding; and
the patient vomited stale, black blood. Finally, the pulse grew weak, the
tongue turned a dry brown, and the victim became depressed, confused, and
delirious.
This French watercolor, done in 1819, is perhaps the first illustration to show a yellow fever victim
in the early stages of the illness. (THE COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS OF PHILADELPHIA)
Rush noted another sign as well: tiny reddish eruptions on the skin.
“They appeared chiefly on the arms, but they sometimes extended to the
breast.” Physicians called these sores petechiae, which is Latin for skin
spots, and Rush observed that they “resembled moscheto bites.”
Clearly, things have gone from bad to worse for the fever patient. (THE COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS OF
PHILADELPHIA)
Hodge then pointed out that the deaths, including his daughter’s, had all
happened on or near Water Street. Foulke told of other deaths along the
street and said he knew the origin of the fevers: the repulsive smell in the
air caused by the rotting coffee on Ball’s Wharf.
The idea that illness was caused by microscopic organisms, such as
bacteria and viruses, was not known at the time. Instead, doctors based their
medical thinking on the 2,500-year-old Greek humoral theory. This concept
