The 1793 Yellow Fever

Foreword

THIS catalog began with a letter. Framed above the cabinet that now holds forty-four other items, the letter is from Benjamin Rush, written in October 1793 from his sickbed, at the height of the most lethal epidemic in American history. He is directing a patient away from a rival physician whose bark-and-wine protocol is, Rush writes, "directly opposed" to his own. Six words contain the entire controversy.

What follows in this catalog is the story of that controversy — told through the books, pamphlets, manuscripts, broadsides, and institutional documents that the physicians, clergy, novelists, civic leaders, and ordinary citizens of Philadelphia produced as they tried to understand what was killing their city. The collection holds what is arguably the most complete private assembly of the primary literature of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in existence outside a major research library: forty-five items, organized here in the order of the events they document.

The catalog is not organized by type of object or by the physician who wrote it. It follows the epidemic itself — from the medical tradition that preceded it, through the first terrible summer, through the pamphlet wars of the mid-1790s, through the recurring epidemics of 1797, 1798, and 1799, through the literature and memory that outlasted the disease, and finally to the long aftermath that stretched into the 1850s. Each item is introduced briefly; the narrative that surrounds it is the story the item illuminates.

The items are the evidence. The epidemic is the story.