Short Account of the Yellow Fever in Philadelphia,

HELMUTH, J. Henry. A Short Account of the Yellow Fever in Philadelphia, for the Reflecting Christian. Phila.: Printed by Jones, Hoff & Derrick, 1794. . The author who was minister of the Lutheran congregation of the city is firmly convinced that the wickedness and dissipation of the inhabitants brought on the plague.

From Catalog I

Helmuth, minister of Philadelphia's German Lutheran congregation, was convinced the epidemic was divine punishment for the city's wickedness. This was not a fringe view -- it was the default theological framework for understanding catastrophe in 1793 Philadelphia. Rush's medical argument that fever arose from rotting coffee was competing not only with Currie's importationism but with the prior certainty that God had sent the plague. The sermon and the treatise coexisted as rival explanations, and they had to fight for the same readers.