Committee of Twenty
Books
- The Summer the Capital Emptied Yellow Fever, Race, and the Collapse of Philadelphia in 1793 · Liszt Think
In August 1793, yellow fever struck Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital. Within weeks, George Washington fled and half the city followed. Five thousand died before the first frost. Amid the exodus, Dr.
- 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…