The Nation’s New Seat of Government…ps—a power it exercised sporadically and with limited effectiveness. The Free African Society, a mutual aid organization founded in 1787 by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, operated in a different world entirely. Jones, a former slave who had purchased his freedom, served as a lay preacher at…
A Philosophy of the Blood and the Bile…elphians had fled, and those who remained were too frightened to enter infected houses. Rush turned to the Free African Society, founded by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen. He appealed to them directly—they were appealed to by respected physician Benjamin Rush—asking them to organize their me…
The Arrival of the Hankey…uld collapse. Volunteers would claim authority over the care of the sick and the burial of the dead. The Free African Society, organized by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, would answer Benjamin Rush’s appeal and send Black nurses into the homes of the dying on the false belief that Black peo…
The Nation’s New Seat of Government…cised sporadically and with limited effectiveness. The Free African Society, a mutual aid organization founded in 1787 by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, operated in a different world entirely. Jones, a former slave who had purchased his freedom, served as a lay preacher at St. George’s Meth…
A Philosophy of the Blood and the Bile…and those who remained were too frightened to enter infected houses. Rush turned to the Free African Society, founded by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen. He appealed to them directly—they were appealed to by respected physician Benjamin Rush—asking them to organize their members to nurse the…
The Arrival of the Hankey…nteers would claim authority over the care of the sick and the burial of the dead. The Free African Society, organized by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, would answer Benjamin Rush’s appeal and send Black nurses into the homes of the dying on the false belief that Black people were immune to…
The Nation’s New Seat of Government…at the federal government was passing through. The capital was a guest, and guests, no matter how powerful, do not rearrange the furniture. Stephen Girard understood this better than most. A French-born trader who had arrived in Philadelphia during the Revolution, Girard had built a fortune th…
The Arrival of the Hankey…Benjamin Rush’s appeal and send Black nurses into the homes of the dying on the false belief that Black people were immune to the disease. Stephen Girard and the French physician Jean Devèze would run the Bush Hill hospital. A committee of citizens would govern the emptied city. The epidemic…
The Exodus Begins…ed their minister had left town began to pack. The logic was not cowardice. It was contagion of a different kind: the contagion of example. Stephen Girard, the wealthy French-born merchant and banker, stayed. He would later take a central role in managing the crisis hospital at Bush Hill. But…
A Philosophy of the Blood and the Bile…tween Rush and the Black community would outlast the epidemic, but it would also generate conflict. After the fever subsided, the publisher Mathew Carey would accuse Black nurses of price-gouging and theft, exploiting the sick rather than helping them. Allen and Jones would respond with a pa…
The Coffee-House Exchange and the Waterfront Stench…t the substantial citizens who lived on the high ground near the State House. The city had seen sickly seasons before. This one would pass. Mathew Carey, the publisher and bookseller, was an exception. He was a careful observer of the city’s moods, a man whose livelihood depended on understa…
The Arrival of the Hankey…he geography, and the ship’s history all point in the same direction. The Hankey is rarely named in the contemporary accounts of the panic. Mathew Carey’s narrative of the epidemic does not identify a specific ship as the source. Benjamin Rush’s letters do not name one either. The newspapers…
The Nation’s New Seat of Government…of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and the officers of the executive departments arrived in waves, seeking quarters near the State House. George Washington, re-elected to a second term in March 1793, occupied a house on Market Street, a block from the seat of the legislature. His cabinet secret…
A Philosophy of the Blood and the Bile…overnment, still headquartered in Philadelphia, had no authority to intervene. The Constitution said nothing about public health. President George Washington was in Virginia for the summer, and his cabinet was scattered. The republic had no mechanism for dealing with plague. It would have to impr…
The Coffee-House Exchange and the Waterfront Stench…zed into distinct but permeable zones. At the top sat the federal government, still finding its footing in its Philadelphia home. President George Washington occupied a rented house on Market Street. Congress was not in session, which meant that the political class had dispersed—some to their hom…
The Exodus Begins…es who had no authority to make decisions and no instructions on how to proceed. The Treasury Department felt the effects most immediately. Alexander Hamilton had been ill, though not with the fever, and was absent. His chief clerk and a skeleton staff kept the office open, but the work of the fed…
The Dispute Over the French Method…at all costs. Rush had tried the stimulating remedies advocated by Dr. Edward Stevens, who in mid-September claimed the treatment had cured Alexander Hamilton, the Secretary of the Treasury. Rush claimed that his patients still died. Stimulation, he concluded, fed the fever rather than quenching i…
The Unpaid Account…. He had tried the stimulating remedies advocated by Jean Devèze and Edward Stevens—the cold-water treatment that Stevens claimed had cured Alexander Hamilton—and found that his patients still died. The medical dispute between Rush’s depleting method and Devèze’s stimulating approach had consumed…
The Arrival of the Hankey…e dying on the false belief that Black people were immune to the disease. Stephen Girard and the French physician Jean Devèze would run the Bush Hill hospital. A committee of citizens would govern the emptied city. The epidemic would expose every fault line in the new republic’s capital:…
The Exodus Begins…Stephen Girard, the wealthy French-born merchant and banker, stayed. He would later take a central role in managing the crisis hospital at Bush Hill. But Girard was an exception. Most of his peers in the merchant class did not share his nerve or his sense of obligation. They closed their…
With the Federal Government Gone…entually formalize the city’s response. Rush would continue his medical campaign. Stephen Girard would later take charge of the hospital at Bush Hill. But in the second week of September, before those structures were fully in place, the city’s response to the epidemic ran through the Free…
The Nation’s New Seat of Government…etreating to country houses or boarding houses in the countryside. Those who remained lived with the heat and the smell and the crowds. Dr. Benjamin Rush walked the streets of Philadelphia with a physician’s eye and a reformer’s conviction. A signer of the Declaration of Independence, Rush ha…
A Philosophy of the Blood and the Bile…d heroic medicine, firmly believing in such practices as bloodletting patients, as well as purges using calomel and other toxic substances. Benjamin Rush, not because he was unique, but because he was the most prominent exponent of a medical orthodoxy that would shape Philadelphia’s response…
The Coffee-House Exchange and the Waterfront StenchHe was thinking about the truth. Benjamin Rush sat at his writing desk on a humid evening late in July 1793, composing a lecture on the unity of disease. All illness was one. The same mo…
The Nation’s New Seat of Government…sing above the rooftops, the bell tower of the State House where the republic had declared its independence and now conducted its business. Philadelphia, the temporary capital of the United States, received them with noise: the cries of stevedores, the creak of tackle, the rumble of cart whe…
A Philosophy of the Blood and the Bile…and a reputation that now stood at the center of American medicine. Outside his window on Walnut Street, the air hung thick and still over Philadelphia. The smell from the docks had grown strange of late—sweet beneath the tar and hemp, like fruit left to rot in a closed room. He had noticed…
The Coffee-House Exchange and the Waterfront Stench…principle that would simplify medicine and save thousands of lives. Outside his window on Walnut Street, the city went about its business. Philadelphia in the summer of 1793 was the temporary capital of a nation still learning to govern itself, a port of roughly fifty thousand people crowde…
The Exodus Begins…of the city center, had been converted to a hospital but was not yet the organized institution it would become under the management of the Committee of Twenty and the direction of Stephen Girard and the French physician Jean Devèze. In these early days of September, it was a place where the sick w…
The Fraught Establishment and Early…ost half its population, and lost the ordinary machinery of care needed somewhere to put the sick who had no one left to sit with them. The Committee of Twenty, meeting daily in the empty rooms of City Hall, faced this question as a matter of physical logistics before it became one of medicine or c…
The Society’s Pledge…d hands. The estate’s windows stood dark against the September sky, its corridors filling with patients carried up from the city below. The Committee of Twenty had secured the property, appointed a French physician named Jean Devèze to superintend the wards, and begun admitting the sick who had now…
The Arrival of the Hankey…urses into the homes of the dying on the false belief that Black people were immune to the disease. Stephen Girard and the French physician Jean Devèze would run the Bush Hill hospital. A committee of citizens would govern the emptied city. The epidemic would expose every fault line in the…
The Exodus Begins…ed institution it would become under the management of the Committee of Twenty and the direction of Stephen Girard and the French physician Jean Devèze. In these early days of September, it was a place where the sick were taken because there was nowhere else. The Committee of Twenty had not…
The Fraught Establishment and Early…intment placed Bush Hill on a collision course with the medical orthodoxy that Benjamin Rush had established in the city. The physician was Jean Devèze. He was a French doctor, trained in the medical traditions of France and the French Caribbean, where yellow fever was a known disease, a re…
The Nation’s New Seat of Government…d of Health existed primarily to impose quarantines on arriving ships—a power it exercised sporadically and with limited effectiveness. The Free African Society, a mutual aid organization founded in 1787 by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, operated in a different world entirely. Jones, a former slav…
A Philosophy of the Blood and the Bile…contagion. But most white Philadelphians had fled, and those who remained were too frightened to enter infected houses. Rush turned to the Free African Society, founded by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen. He appealed to them directly—they were appealed to by respected physician Benjamin Rush—asking…
The Arrival of the Hankey…ld flee. The city’s institutions would collapse. Volunteers would claim authority over the care of the sick and the burial of the dead. The Free African Society, organized by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, would answer Benjamin Rush’s appeal and send Black nurses into the homes of the dying on the…