Eighteenth-century Philadelphia was a small town. The men who founded its library also founded its hospital, its college, its fire company and its learned society, sat in its Assembly, witnessed one another's bonds, and married one another's daughters. Each person here is given a short life, the institutions he or she belonged to, and the objects in the collection that carry the name.
Choose an institution below to see who belonged to it. The same names light up again and again, which is the point.
For researchers: every name leads to the primary sources in the collection that carry it, whether a signature, a letter, an imprint or a witness on a bond. 91 people are entered so far, and names are added as the collection grows. Research continues on all aspects of this living site. Any assistance or information is more than welcome.
Belonged to
Everyone in the cast. Choose an institution above to see who belonged to it, then choose a name to read the life.
The Two Principals
The collection is built around two men who shared a name, a city, and for fifteen years a friendship. Everyone else on this page is here because of one of them, and most because of both.
Benjamin Franklin
1706-1790
Printer, writer, natural philosopher and statesman. He arrived in Philadelphia at seventeen with a Dutch dollar in his pocket, and within thirty years had founded or helped to found nearly every public institution the city possessed. He spent most of the years from 1757 to 1785 in London and Paris. He came home to sign the Constitution, served as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, and in his last years he was the patron who opened doors for the young Dr. Rush.
Physician, professor, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and reformer. He was apprenticed to John Redman, took his degree at Edinburgh under William Cullen, and met Franklin in London in 1768, who lent him money and sent him on to Paris. He served the Pennsylvania Hospital from 1783 until his death, taught some three thousand students, and stayed in the city through the fever of 1793. He dedicated his Edinburgh thesis to Franklin, and carried Franklin's habits of public improvement into medicine.
The break between Britain and America ran through Franklin's own household. Three generations of the family appear in the collection, each in his or her own hand.
Deborah Read Franklin
c. 1708-1774
Franklin's wife for forty-four years. She kept the shop, the accounts and the post office, and she ran the household alone through the fifteen years he spent abroad, defending the house against the Stamp Act mob in 1765. She would not cross the ocean, and she died while he was still in London. Her spelling was phonetic and her signature is of the greatest rarity.
Franklin's son, raised in his house. He helped to fly the kite, served as clerk of the Assembly and postmaster of Philadelphia, and pledged ten pounds to the Hospital in 1754. He went to London with his father, read law, and in 1762 was made royal Governor of New Jersey. He speculated in western land with his father and the Whartons, stayed loyal to the Crown in 1776, was imprisoned in Connecticut, and died an exile in London. Father and son were never reconciled.
William's son and Franklin's grandson. Franklin took him to Paris in 1776 in place of the son he had lost, and made him secretary of the American mission. He inherited his grandfather's papers and, after long delay, published them as the Memoirs and the Private Correspondence. Like his father and grandfather he speculated in American land.
Franklin's elder brother and his first master. He printed the New-England Courant in Boston, took Benjamin as an apprentice at twelve, and was jailed for offending the authorities. The younger brother ran the paper in his absence and then ran away from the indenture. The quarrel sent Franklin to Philadelphia.
Widow of James Franklin, Benjamin's older brother. When James died in 1735 she kept the Newport press running, and she was the only printer in Rhode Island in the 1740s. Her son James Jr. printed the colony's laws on the same press.
In 1727 Franklin gathered a dozen young tradesmen into a club for mutual improvement. The habit of pooling effort became a habit of founding things.
Joseph Breintnall
d. 1746
A scrivener, an original member of the Junto, and the first secretary of the Library Company. He wrote some of the Busy-Body papers with Franklin and worked with him on the nature prints from leaves that were used to defeat counterfeiters of paper money. He served as Sheriff of Philadelphia.
A Welsh-descended pressman who worked beside Franklin in Keimer's shop and was an original member of the Junto. His father put up the money that let the two set up as Franklin and Meredith in 1728. He drank, the partnership was dissolved in 1730, and he went to farm in North Carolina.
The leading silversmith of the city and maker of the inkstand used at the signing of the Declaration and the Constitution. He was a member of the Junto, a director of the Library Company, an original trustee of the Academy, an original director of the Contributionship, and one of Franklin's collaborators in the electrical experiments.
A shoemaker who taught himself mathematics, joined the Junto, served as librarian of the Library Company, and became Surveyor General of Pennsylvania. He laid out the town of Easton. Franklin wrote his character after his death.
A surveyor and an original member of the Junto, who, Franklin said, loved books and sometimes made a few verses. He succeeded Parsons as Surveyor General and published the great map of the improved part of Pennsylvania in 1759. Land warrants from Franklin's press are addressed to him.
An ironmonger and Franklin's close friend for sixty years. He sat in the Junto, was a director of the Library Company and an original director of the Contributionship, and was one of the twelve original Managers of the Hospital. As its Treasurer from 1756 to 1768 he witnessed hundreds of its promissory notes and wrote the receipts on their backs, including the one recording that David Hall paid William Franklin's pledge.
A master builder, a director of the Library Company for many years, an original Manager of the Hospital and the designer of its building, and an original director of the Contributionship. He sat in the Assembly with Franklin, served as mayor, and went to the First Continental Congress. His name is on the Hospital's notes as a witness.
A London-born lawyer, an original director of the Library Company, an original trustee of the Academy, and the first president of the Philosophical Society of 1743. Franklin credited him with discovering the power of points to draw off the electrical fire. He was the father of Francis Hopkinson.
The leading scrivener and conveyancer of the province and Recorder of Deeds for half a century. He drew up the articles of association of the Library Company in 1731, and much of the legal paper of the province passed through his office. He was the great-uncle of the novelist Charles Brockden Brown.
Franklin's first trade, and the one he put on his tombstone. His masters, his rivals, his partners, and the men who printed Rush.
Samuel Keimer
c. 1688-1742
The eccentric London printer who gave the young Franklin his first work in Philadelphia in 1723. Franklin left him, set up in competition, and bought the failing Pennsylvania Gazette from him in 1729. Keimer ended in Barbados.
The first printer of Philadelphia and publisher of its first newspaper, the American Weekly Mercury. He was the established man when Franklin arrived and his rival for twenty years, in newspapers, in almanacs, in the post office, and in the race to publish the first American magazine in 1741.
Andrew Bradford's nephew, printer of the Pennsylvania Journal and keeper of the London Coffee House. He was Franklin and Hall's principal competitor and the printer of the patriot cause. On 2 May 1757 a "Wm. Bradford" witnessed three of the Hospital's promissory notes with Daniel Roberdeau, those of Plunket Fleeson, James Wharton and William West. He is almost certainly this man, the only William Bradford of standing in the city that year. His son William Bradford Jr. became Attorney General of the United States.
A Scottish journeyman sent to Franklin by William Strahan in 1744. Franklin made him his partner in 1748 and retired from the shop, and for eighteen years the imprint read Franklin and Hall. He ran the press that printed the Hospital's note forms, and in 1763 it was Hall who paid off William Franklin's pledge to the Hospital.
Printer to the King, publisher of Johnson, Hume and Gibbon, and Franklin's closest friend in London. He sent David Hall to Philadelphia, and for decades he supplied Franklin and Hall with type and books, while Franklin sent American printing to him in return. In July 1775 Franklin wrote him the famous letter that ends, you are now my enemy, and I am yours. He never sent it, and the friendship survived the war. Strahan belongs here as part of the story. No object in the collection yet bears his name.
Franklin's partner in New York from 1742 and the most successful of the printers he set up in other colonies. He became comptroller of the colonial post office under Franklin and printed at New York, Woodbridge and Burlington.
A Huguenot refugee who reached Philadelphia by way of Holland in 1731 and taught French. He worked as a journeyman in Franklin's shop, edited the short-lived Philadelphische Zeitung for him, and in 1732 became the first librarian of the Library Company. In 1733 Franklin sent him to Charleston as his partner, where he revived the South-Carolina Gazette. He died in 1738, and his widow Elizabeth carried on the press so ably that Franklin held her up in the Autobiography as a model. No object in the collection yet bears his name.
The German printer of Germantown, who printed the first Bible in a European language in America in 1743. He was the voice of the Pennsylvania Germans and Franklin's competitor for their custom and their votes.
A papermaker near Germantown. He first appears in Franklin's accounts in 1737, working for the Dewees family, and became the chief papermaker with whom Franklin dealt, taking in the rags Franklin collected and returning them as paper. Franklin kept a separate ledger, now lost, for their dealings in 1742 and 1743, and in the later 1740s bought from him the "money paper" on which the province's bills of credit were printed.
An Irish-born printer who married a niece of Deborah Franklin. Franklin set him up in Lancaster and made him postmaster of Philadelphia in 1757. In 1761 he pledged the Hospital twenty shillings a year for life. He later took orders and died a parish priest in Virginia.
William Dunlap's nephew and apprentice, who took over the shop. On the night of 4 July 1776 he printed the first broadside of the Declaration of Independence. He was printer to Congress and published the first daily newspaper in the United States.
A Scottish printer and binder who published the Pennsylvania Magazine with Thomas Paine as editor, printed the first English Bible in America in 1782, and printed the early Transactions of the Philosophical Society.
The Scottish bookseller of Second Street who published the first American encyclopaedia and was the principal publisher of American medicine in Rush's lifetime. Much of what Rush wrote came from his shop.
An Irish printer who had worked at Franklin's press at Passy before he fled to Philadelphia. He served on the citizens' committee in 1793 and wrote the Short Account of the Malignant Fever within weeks of its end. His charges against the Black nurses drew the reply of Absalom Jones and Richard Allen.
A Boston silversmith and engraver whom Franklin knew and employed. He cut the plate for the Pennsylvania fireplace pamphlet in 1744, moved to Philadelphia in the 1750s, and engraved Lewis Evans's General Map of the Middle British Colonies, which Franklin and Hall printed in 1755. He died of smallpox in Philadelphia in 1759.
A German printer who became Franklin's partner for the German trade about 1749. Together they issued Johann Arndt's Wahres Christenthum in 1751, a book of more than thirteen hundred pages with sixty-four engraved plates, and among the largest books yet printed in the colonies. Böhm died the same year.
The elder Ames, a physician and tavern keeper of Dedham, Massachusetts, began his Astronomical Diary in 1725. It became the most widely read almanac in New England and the chief rival of Poor Richard in the northern colonies. His son Nathaniel, also a physician, carried it on after 1764. It was the son's almanac for 1771 that first put Franklin's epitaph on himself into print, forty-two years after he wrote it.
The first hospital in British America was founded in 1751. These are the men who proposed it, managed it, and walked its wards before Rush.
Thomas Bond
1713-1784
The physician whose idea the Hospital was. He could raise no money for it until Franklin took it up. He was a member of the Library Company, an original member of the Philosophical Society in 1743, an original trustee of the Academy, and in 1766 began the first course of clinical lectures in America at the Hospital's bedsides. His name is No. 11 in the founders' book.
Thomas Bond's younger brother, trained at Leiden, Paris, Edinburgh and London. He was one of the Hospital's three original attending physicians, an original member of the Philosophical Society and an original trustee of the Academy. His promissory note, No. 83, is in the collection.
An original director of the Library Company in 1731 and one of the Hospital's first consulting physicians. In 1745 Franklin printed his Essay on the West-India Dry-Gripes, which traced the colic to rum distilled through lead. He was still attending the wards when Rush walked them as an apprentice.
One of the three physicians who first attended the Hospital in 1751, and an original trustee of the Academy. He served without pay until a stroke ended his practice, and left the Hospital a legacy.
A Leiden graduate, physician to the Hospital for nearly thirty years, and the first President of the College of Physicians. Rush lived under his roof as his apprentice from 1761 to 1766. His note is No. 51 in the founders' book, and the note of his grandson John Redman Coxe, Rush's own pupil, is the last in the Hospital's books.
For sixty years a leading practitioner of the city, physician to the Hospital from 1753, and a member of the Continental Congress. His note is No. 71 in the founders' book. His son and namesake became Rush's great adversary.
Trained in London and Edinburgh, he gave the first anatomical lectures in America in 1762 and was professor of anatomy in the medical school. As Director General of the army's hospitals he was the target of Rush's charges of maladministration in 1777, the bitterest quarrel of Rush's life.
Redman's apprentice before Rush, an Edinburgh graduate, and the founder of the first medical school in America at the College of Philadelphia in 1765. He brought Rush onto its faculty. Congress made him Director General of the army's hospitals and then dismissed him, and Rush wrote the account of his life.
A Quaker merchant and the first President of the Managers of the Hospital. His pledge of one hundred pounds is No. 3 in the founders' book. In May 1755 he laid the cornerstone, with its inscription by Franklin.
A Quaker merchant and the Hospital's first Treasurer. One of the twelve original Managers, elected at the State-House on 1 July 1751, he received the subscribers' promissory notes, and the books mark the change of Treasurers by altering the payee on notes. He witnessed many of them himself. Timothy Matlack Jr., later the penman of the Declaration of Independence, was an apprentice in his counting house. With John Smith he wrote on 1 August 1754 to ask Thomas Worth to solicit subscriptions among his neighbours.
The diarist, and one of the twelve original Managers of the Hospital, elected at the State-House on 1 July 1751. He and John Reynell witnessed many of the subscribers' promissory notes in the 1754 books, and in August of that year the two of them wrote to Thomas Worth to ask his help in raising money. He is not to be confused with John Smith of Kingsess, whose bond of 1760 is also in the Founders' Book.
A Quaker merchant, among the richest men in the province, and for many years a member of the Assembly. His is the first note in the founders' book, one hundred pounds pledged in 1751 and witnessed by his son Israel. He died in 1754, and his sons led the Quaker party for a generation.
Called the King of the Quakers. He was one of the twelve original Managers of the Hospital and an original director of the Contributionship. He founded the Friendly Association to make peace with the Delaware, was a target of the Paxton marchers, and was exiled to Virginia in 1777. His note is No. 2 in the founders' book.
An Anglican clergyman, Secretary of the Province for the Penns, and later rector of Christ Church. He was an original Manager of the Hospital, No. 4 in the founders' book, and president of the trustees of the Academy. With Franklin he recruited William Smith to head it.
A Quaker merchant and one of Franklin's most constant correspondents. He backed the Pennsylvania Chronicle as the organ of Franklin's party and was deep in the western land companies with his brother Samuel and both Franklins. He served as Treasurer of the Hospital, and his wife Rachel witnessed one of its notes. In 1777 he was exiled to Virginia by a government headed by his own cousin.
The addressee of the Managers' appeal of 1 August 1754. The letter asks him to put the Hospital's case to his neighbours, to report what he has raised, and to say what he is willing to give himself. Who he was, and where he lived, is not yet established. Any information about him is welcome.
A Scot trained at Edinburgh, Leiden and Paris, and the only physician in Boston with a medical degree. In the smallpox epidemic of 1721 he led the opposition to the inoculation urged by Cotton Mather and practised by Zabdiel Boylston, and he carried on the fight in James Franklin's New-England Courant while the young Benjamin was an apprentice in the shop. His pamphlet on inoculation of 1722 came from James Franklin's press. Franklin later became inoculation's advocate, after losing his own son to the disease.
A Virginia physician and botanist, remembered for the great map of 1755 on which the boundaries of the United States were later drawn. He wrote an account of the yellow fever in Virginia in 1741 and 1742 and sent it to Franklin. Franklin gave the manuscript to Rush, and in the worst days of 1793 Rush found in it the argument for strong purges that became his calomel and jalap. Mitchell belongs here as part of the story. No object in the collection yet bears his name.
The line of medical teaching ran from Leiden to Edinburgh to Philadelphia, and Rush stood at the end of it.
Herman Boerhaave
1668-1738
Professor at Leiden and the teacher of all Europe. He made bedside teaching the centre of medical education. Cullen's teachers were his pupils, and so the line runs from Boerhaave to Cullen to Rush.
Boerhaave's pupil and commentator, physician to the Empress Maria Theresa, and founder of the Vienna school. His Commentaries on Boerhaave's aphorisms were a standard text. Rush's own copy is in the collection.
Professor of the practice of physic at Edinburgh and the greatest medical teacher of his age. Rush studied under him from 1766 to 1768 and revered him, though he later broke with his system. Franklin corresponded with him and sent young Philadelphians to his lectures.
A Quaker physician of London, founder of the Medical Society of London, and a friend and correspondent of both Franklin and Rush. He published Rush in England and wrote the memoir of Fothergill, who had been a patron of the Pennsylvania Hospital.
Professor of anatomy at the University, author of the first American textbook of anatomy, and successor to Jefferson as president of the Philosophical Society. He was Rush's colleague for twenty-five years and broke with him over the treatment of the fever in 1793. His grandfather, the glassmaker, is No. 26 in the Hospital's founders' book.
The grandson of Philip Syng the silversmith, trained under John Hunter in London, and called the father of American surgery. He worked at Bush Hill in 1793, survived the fever, and became Rush's ally, his physician, and his colleague at the Hospital and the University.
Professor of natural history, botany and materia medica at the University, author of the first American textbook of botany, and the nephew of David Rittenhouse. He succeeded to Rush's chair of the practice of physic in 1813.
A founding Fellow of the College of Physicians and Rush's most persistent opponent in the fever years. He held that the yellow fever was imported and contagious, where Rush held that it arose from the filth of the wharves, and he attacked Rush's bleeding and purging in print.
Professor of chemistry at the University, physician of the port, and a nephew of Israel Pemberton. He was asked by the Governor in August 1793 whether a contagious disease was in the city. He died of it in the first week of September.
Franklin's science was done by letter. These are the correspondents who made it possible and the men who carried it on.
Peter Collinson
1694-1768
A Quaker mercer of London and Fellow of the Royal Society, who served the Library Company as its unpaid agent for thirty years. In 1745 he sent it a glass tube and an account of the German electrical experiments. Franklin's discoveries were reported in letters to him, and Collinson saw them into print.
The Quaker farmer of Kingsessing whom Linnaeus called the greatest natural botanist in the world. He founded the first botanic garden in America, supplied Collinson with seeds and plants, and was an original member of the Philosophical Society in 1743. Franklin printed his proposals and promoted his travels.
John Bartram's son, a naturalist and one of the finest natural history draughtsmen of his century. He travelled with his father to Florida in 1765, where they found the flowering tree they named Franklinia for their friend. From 1773 to 1777 he explored the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida alone, and his Travels of 1791 was read across Europe and left its mark on Coleridge and Wordsworth. He was offered the chair of botany at the University in 1782 and declined it, drew the plates for Benjamin Smith Barton's Elements of Botany, and kept the garden at Kingsessing until his death.
William Penn's secretary, chief justice, and the most learned man in the colonies. He was the young Franklin's patron, advised the Library Company on its first order of books, and left his own library to the public. Franklin printed his translations of Cato's Moral Distichs and of Cicero's Cato Major, the second often called the finest book from his press.
Clockmaker, astronomer and maker of the orreries. He observed the transit of Venus in 1769, served as Treasurer of Pennsylvania through the war, succeeded Franklin as president of the Philosophical Society, and was the first Director of the Mint. Rush delivered his eulogy. His daughter married Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant.
The discoverer of oxygen and Franklin's friend in London, who wrote the history of electricity at Franklin's urging and recorded the story of the kite. Driven from Birmingham by a mob in 1791, he settled in Pennsylvania, where Rush was his friend and physician.
A London portrait painter and electrician. He painted Franklin in 1759, and the portrait was carried off from Franklin's house by Major André in 1778 and came back to America only in 1906. He quarrelled with Franklin over lightning rods, arguing for blunt knobs against Franklin's points, and in 1777 he won the King to his side. The Repeal, or the Funeral of Miss Ame-Stamp, the most popular satirical print of 1766, was his design.
Franklin's politics were made in the Assembly against the Penns, and unmade in London over western land.
Thomas Penn
1702-1775
Son of the founder and chief Proprietor of Pennsylvania. He gave to the Library Company and the Academy, and in 1747 the Proprietors sent the Library Company a complete electrical apparatus, just as Franklin and his friends were beginning their experiments. He came to regard Franklin as a dangerous man. Franklin went to London in 1757 to fight him over the taxing of the proprietary estates, and again in 1764 to have him removed.
Twice Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania for the Penns, mayor of Philadelphia, an original trustee of the Academy, and builder of Bush Hill, the house that became the fever hospital of 1793. Proclamations in his name came from Franklin's press.
A Scottish clergyman whom Franklin and Richard Peters brought to Philadelphia in 1753 to head the Academy. As first Provost of the College he made it a seat of learning, and as the Penns' pamphleteer he became Franklin's bitter enemy. The Assembly jailed him in 1758. He delivered Franklin's eulogy in 1791, and Rush left a merciless sketch of him. His Hospital note styles him Rector of the Academy.
Franklin's chief political partner in Pennsylvania, Speaker of the Assembly, and keeper of his papers when he went abroad. His plan of union failed in the First Continental Congress by one vote. He went over to the British in 1776, and Franklin's papers left in his care were scattered.
Son of Thomas Hopkinson, first pupil of the Academy, lawyer, poet, composer, and signer of the Declaration beside Franklin and Rush. Franklin named him an executor and left him his scientific instruments. He pledged ten pounds to the Hospital in 1768 and paid it off in full in November 1778.
A partner in Baynton, Wharton and Morgan and the promoter of the Indiana and Vandalia grants. He spent the years from 1769 in London pressing for a new colony on the Ohio, with Franklin as his ally and fellow shareholder, and wrote Plain Facts in defence of the Indian title. He was the brother of Thomas Wharton the elder.
An Irish-born trader, deputy to Sir William Johnson in Indian affairs, and the largest and least solvent land speculator on the frontier. He arranged the Otsego purchase at Fort Stanwix in which both Franklins and the Whartons had shares, and he owed William Franklin several thousand pounds.
Indian trader, soldier, and Croghan's partner. He led the suffering traders who claimed compensation in land for their losses in 1763, the origin of the Indiana grant, and went to London with Samuel Wharton in 1769 to press it.
The elder Charles Read was a Philadelphia merchant, mayor of the city, and a trustee of the General Loan Office, whose name stands in type on the loan office bond Franklin printed in 1735. He was probably kin to Deborah Read. His son Charles moved to New Jersey and became Secretary of the province, a justice of its Supreme Court, and an ironmaster. In 1764 he addressed the open letter on the murder of the Conestoga Indians to John Ladd, the Gloucester County justice of the collection's Paxton letter.
A Burlington lawyer of the Quaker Smith family, and brother of Samuel Smith, whose History of New Jersey James Parker printed in 1765. He sat for New Jersey in the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1776 and kept a diary of its debates. The collection's copy of William Franklin's printed letter of June 1776 was his, with his manuscript note on the last page.
The friends and correspondents of both men in the founding of the republic.
George Washington
1732-1799
Franklin went to his camp at Cambridge in 1775, and left him his crab-tree walking stick in his will. Rush served under him as a surgeon general, criticised his command in the winter of Valley Forge in a letter that reached him, and regretted it for the rest of his life.
He served with Franklin in Congress and at Paris and came to resent him. With Rush it was the reverse. They met in 1774 and corresponded for nearly forty years, and it was Rush who in 1812 brought Adams and Jefferson back into friendship.
He sat with Franklin on the committee that drafted the Declaration and succeeded him as minister to France, saying that no one could replace him. He was Rush's correspondent on medicine and religion, and asked Rush to prepare Meriwether Lewis for the journey west.
He came to Philadelphia in 1774 with a letter of introduction from Franklin. Rush urged him to write the pamphlet on independence, suggested its title, Common Sense, and found him a printer. In 1787 he sat with Franklin and Rush in the Society for Political Inquiries, which met in Franklin's library.
The financier of the Revolution, signer of the Declaration and the Constitution, and the richest man in America until his North American Land Company collapsed. He spent three years in the Prune Street debtors' prison. A share certificate he signed for William Temple Franklin is in the collection.
A Scot who read law under John Dickinson, signed the Declaration and the Constitution, and sat on the first Supreme Court. At the Convention of 1787 he read Franklin's speeches for him when the old man could not stand to deliver them. He was one of Pennsylvania's four counsel in the Wyoming controversy with Connecticut, with William Bradford Jr., Joseph Reed and Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant, and is named with them on the collection's treasury order of January 1783.
Son of the printer of the Pennsylvania Journal, a Princeton classmate and close friend of James Madison, and an officer at Valley Forge. He was Attorney General of Pennsylvania from 1780, and with James Wilson, Joseph Reed and Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant he argued the state's case at the Trenton trial of 1782. Rush had been writing against the gallows since 1787. In 1793 Bradford, by then a justice of the state's Supreme Court, wrote the Enquiry that carried the argument into law, and the next year Pennsylvania confined the punishment of death to murder in the first degree. Washington made him Attorney General of the United States in 1794. He died in office at thirty-nine.
Between August and November 1793 the yellow fever killed about one in ten of the people of Philadelphia. These are the ones who stayed.
Absalom Jones
1746-1818
Born enslaved in Delaware, he bought his freedom, founded the Free African Society with Richard Allen in 1787, and became the first Black priest of the Episcopal Church. Rush helped to raise the money for his African Church. At Rush's request he organised the Black nurses and gravediggers of 1793, and with Allen wrote the Narrative that answered Mathew Carey.
Born enslaved, a Methodist preacher, co-founder of the Free African Society, and founder of Mother Bethel and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He worked through the epidemic, took the fever and survived it.
Pennsylvania's first Attorney General and counsel for the state at the Trenton trial of 1782. He married the daughter of David Rittenhouse. He stayed in the city in 1793, served on the citizens' committee, and died of the fever on 8 October.
A French army surgeon and refugee from Saint-Domingue, who took charge of the fever hospital at Bush Hill under Stephen Girard. He treated mildly, opposed Rush's bleeding, denied that the fever was contagious, and published his account of it in French and English.
An English journalist who wrote in Philadelphia as Peter Porcupine. He ridiculed Rush's bleeding through the fever of 1797, and Rush sued him for libel. The jury awarded five thousand dollars on the very day that Washington died, after being heavily bled by his own physicians. Cobbett answered with the Rush-Light and sailed for England.
Memberships are marked only where they can be documented, so a missing mark is not a denial. A complete list of every name that appears in the catalogue records is kept as a working index of names.
Research continues on all aspects of this living site. Any assistance or information is more than welcome. Write to erik@eislibris.com.
