IN August 1900, Major Walter Reed and his team of United States Army physicians demonstrated, in a series of controlled experiments in Cuba, that yellow fever was transmitted by the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito. The vector that Rush had noted flying in unusual numbers before epidemic outbreaks, the standing water he had correlated with epidemic seasons, the movement patterns that had made the disease seem to follow ships — all of it snapped into focus. The mechanism that had defeated Rush and Currie and Cathrall and Ffirth and Chisholm and Webster for more than a century had been in the air above their patients all along, biting.
Rush was not entirely wrong. He was right that the disease arose locally — it did, in the sense that local mosquito populations were the proximate cause of local outbreaks. He was right that it was not contagious through direct human contact — Ffirth's experiments had confirmed as much. He was wrong about miasma, wrong about vascular tension, and catastrophically wrong about treatment: aggressive bloodletting and calomel purging killed people who might have survived on bark and wine and rest. The patients at Bush Hill under Deveze survived at higher rates than Rush's patients. Rush was certain he was right. He was treating people as he worked his way toward being wrong.
Currie was closer to the truth on the importation question — the disease was carried by ship, in the sense that infected mosquitoes and their eggs traveled in water containers on vessels from the Caribbean. But his tonic treatment was right for reasons he could not yet articulate; his contagion theory was wrong in its mechanism though partially correct in its epidemiology; and his insistence on quarantine, which Rush mocked, was the practical intervention that came closest to interrupting mosquito transmission even without understanding why.
The collection you are looking at is the documentary record of very intelligent people being wrong in very interesting ways at a moment when being wrong cost lives. It is also the record of those people — Rush and Currie and Cathrall and Ffirth and Caldwell and Chisholm and Webster and Carey and Jones and Allen and Cresson and Brown and Condie and Folwell and Armstrong and Daniell — doing the best they could with the tools they had, in a crisis that did not wait for certainty. The letter framed above the cabinet, the anchor of the whole collection, was written from a sickbed. Rush was sick. He kept writing. The prescriptions were directly opposed to each other. The argument was worth having. This is what it looked like.
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Selected Secondary Literature
The following works are the essential companions to the primary sources in this catalog. They are organized by subject rather than by date.
The Epidemic: Narrative and Overview
Powell, J.H.
Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949. The definitive narrative history; the starting point for all subsequent scholarship on 1793.
Estes, J. Worth, and Billy G. Smith, eds.
A Melancholy Scene of Devastation: The Public Response to the 1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic. Philadelphia: College of Physicians, 1997. The essential scholarly essay collection.
Apel, Thomas A.
Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds: Science and the Yellow Fever Controversy in the Early American Republic. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. The best recent intellectual history of the medical debate.
Rush: Biography and Letters
Fried, Stephen.
Rush: Revolution, Madness & the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father. New York: Crown, 2018. The comprehensive modern biography.
Brodsky, Alyn.
Benjamin Rush: Patriot and Physician. New York: Truman Talley Books, 2004. Alternative biography; stronger on Rush's medical theory.
Rush, Benjamin.
The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush. Edited by George W. Corner. Princeton: American Philosophical Society, 1948. Essential primary source.
Butterfield, L.H., ed.
Letters of Benjamin Rush. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951. The essential correspondence.
Politics, Race, and Society
Pernick, Martin S.
"Politics, Parties, and Pestilence: Epidemic Yellow Fever in Philadelphia and the Rise of the First Party System." William and Mary Quarterly 29, no. 4 (1972): 559-586. Key analysis of the political dimensions of the medical controversy.
Jones, Absalom, and Richard Allen.
A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia. Philadelphia, 1794. The essential counter-narrative to Carey; one of the earliest political documents by African Americans in American history.
Nash, Gary B.
Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Essential context for the Jones-Allen story.
Bibliography and Reference
Fox, Dorothy L.
A List of Works Relating to Yellow Fever in Philadelphia, 1793-1815. Essential bibliographic reference for the primary literature in this catalog.
Miner, Dorothy E.
Bibliography of the Yellow Fever Epidemic. The standard short-title reference for all pamphlets, books, and broadsides in this catalog.