Anderson, L. H. (2011). Fever 1793. Simon and Schuster.
Charles 4th floor Juvenile fiction
In 1793 Philadelphia, sixteen-year-old Matilda Cook, separated from her sick mother, learns about perseverance and self-reliance when she is forced to cope with the horrors of a yellow fever epidemic.
Charles BookBot
Online
Using the yellow fever epidemic of the late 18th century as a backdrop, this title opens an important window onto the conduct of scientific inquiry in the early American republic. Through this thoughtful investigation of the yellow fever epidemic and engaging examination of natural science in early America, Thomas Apel demonstrates that the scientific imaginations of early republicans were far broader than historians have realized.
Online
Charles BookBot
This gothic classic is the first fictional account of the yellow fever epidemic
Ginsburg Leisure Reading NON FICTION CHE
Ambler Stacks E302.6.H2 C48 2005
This biography inspired the hit musical Hamilton and outlines the life of a key player during the yellow fever epidemic.
Investigates thousands of descriptions of epidemics including the 18th century yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia to challenge the dominant hypothesis that epidemics invariably provoke hatred, blaming of the 'other', and victimising bearers of epidemic diseases.
Charles Bookbot
An installment in the Images of America series which outlines the history of the College of Physicians and their role in medicine in Philadelphia.
Details how early Americans struggled to preserve their collective health against both the strange new perils of the colonial environment and the familiar dangers of the traditional city, through a period of profound transformation in both politics and medicine.
Ambler Library
Ginsburg Library Leisure Reading B FRI
Biography of Dr. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence, one of the leading physicians in Philadelphia during the yellow fever epidemic.
Ambler Library IMC RA644.Y4 M875 2003
Award winning young adult nonfiction history of the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 in Philadelphia. It portrays the agony and pain this disease brought upon the American people marking its place in history in order to never be forgotten.
Charles Library 4th floor Stacks BX8459.A4 N49 2008
Online
A biography of Richard Allen, one of the key figures who mobilized black citizens to care for sick Philadelphians during the yellow fever epidemic.
Ginsburg remote storage RC211 .P5 P6 1949
Charles 4th floor stacks RC211.P5P6 1949
Charles BookBot
Online
In this psychological portrait of Philadelphia in terror from the 1793 yellow fever epidemic, J. H. Powell presents a penetrating study of human nature revealing itself.
Charles Library Stacks F158.4 .R33 2015
A biography of the key figure who kept Bush Hill running as a hospital for yellow fever.
Charles Leisure Reading WIN
Chronicles the impact of mosquito-borne disease, including yellow fever, throughout history.
The article discusses an outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1793, focusing on how the people of Philadelphia reacted to the epidemic.
Philadelphia's 1793 yellow fever epidemic is well known in the history of the early republic, and so too is Mathew Carey's Short Account of the Malignant Fever, the influential pamphlet that described the city's moral breakdown and recovery during the pestilence. By reconstructing the circumstances of its composition, and by deconstructing its narrative elements, this article contends that Carey's Short Account was a literary creation, one that imitated historical plague stories.
An online article that highlights a National Museum of American History online seminar, which is shared as a video.
This article addresses one significant aspect of the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic that has been relatively neglected: the role of African American Philadelphians who served the sick and the public response to their efforts.
There was a historical belief that West and Central Africans and their descendants were immune to yellow fever. This article contends there is no evidence that such immunity ever existed, so it is time for historians to discard this theory.
An overview of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic and its lasting repercussions to Philadelphia and the country.
This article uses debates regarding yellow fever causality among leading healers in 19th-century Galveston, Texas, U.S., as a means of exploring the extent to which ideas are social actors. That is, the analysis demonstrates that ideas about yellow fever causality shaped contemporaneous public health pol-icy responses to yellow fever outbreaks in 19th-century Galveston. The article contributes to the growing literature documenting that contagionist and anti-contagionist views were often assimilated, and also supports the historiography showing that the predisposing/exciting causes dichotomy is a more robust intellectual framework for understanding 19th-century attributions of disease causality.
Discusses Benjamin Rush’s plea for African American volunteers to help during the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic and the ensuing debate in pamphlets among African American publishers. His request and this subsequent debate around volunteering and involvement in the epidemic raises problematic issues around race, citizenship and asking those denied citizenship to act as citizens.
Discusses Benjamin Rush’s unwarranted claims that he had discovered a cure, intense bleeding and purging, for yellow fever.
Discusses the impact the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic had on early United States culture.
“Understanding the way that public health conditioned and catalyzed black community action in this period is necessary not only to understanding how these events unfolded, but also to contextualizing the emergence of black churches in the 1790s as inherently tied to these public health concerns.”
This essay examines how society constructed a category of ‘black people’ during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in order to promote a class agenda.
Arguments over the origin of yellow fever helped create the first party system in American politics.
The article discusses the Yellow Fever epidemic that afflicted Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, then the capital of the U.S., in 1793. The efforts of medical doctors, particularly Dr. Benjamin Rush, to find a cure for the disease are examined. According to the article, more than ten percent of Philadelphia's population of 40,000 died from the fever and nearly half of the surviving population abandoned the city. The article discusses transmission of the fever by the Aedes aegypyi mosquito. According to the author, Rush's treatments to cure the disease, purging and bloodletting, were controversial. The tension within the Philadelphia medical community regarding Rush's treatment and refusal among physicians to collaborate are described, as are recovery efforts by African Americans.
The hope of this newspaper was to “unite Philadelphians in their struggles against the fever by providing a forum in which they could discuss the epidemic.”
This history of the yellow fever epidemic was read at the 1938 meeting of the Pennsylvania Historical Association.
The leaders of Philadelphia's black community found the suffering before them equally frightful, but from their perspective the dissolution of the bonds of society afforded an opportunity to forge new social bonds between members of their race and the larger community. As they had during the Revolution, and as they did during many subsequent crises in American history, African Americans stepped forward in this period of turmoil to demonstrate their capacity for bearing the responsibilities of citizenship.
The “Epidemics: Yellow Fever and Malaria” segment discusses that, “of everyone that's ever died, half were killed by mosquito transmitted diseases like yellow fever and malaria.”
In June 1900, Major Walter Reed, Chief Surgeon of the U.S. Army, led a medical team to Cuba on a mission to investigate yellow fever. For more than 200 years, the disease had terrorized the United States, killing an estimated 100,000 people in the 19th century alone. Shortly after Reed and his team arrived in Havana, they began testing the radical theories of Carlos Finlay, a Cuban doctor who believed that mosquitoes spread yellow fever. This program documents the heroic efforts of Reed's medical team, some of whom put their own lives on the line to verify Finlay's theory. When yellow fever struck New Orleans in 1905, an aggressive mosquito eradication campaign successfully ended the epidemic. It was the last yellow fever outbreak in the United States and the first major public health triumph of the 20th century. Distributed by PBS Distribution.
An advertisement for Dr. Benjamin Rush’s Mercurial Sweating Powder to cure yellow fever
“This little piece was written about the end of the winter 1793-94, on the occasion of a growing alarm of the yellow fever being again in Philadelphia.”
A letter between brothers, with one worrying about the health of his family and considering leaving Philadelphia, with physicians advising to “avoid infectious persons and places.”
A firsthand account of the disease.
A report written by two leaders of the local Black community, who helped organized the community response to yellow fever.
Preeminent Dr. Rush explains his attempts to cure yellow fever.
An extensive listing of what to do if a person comes down with yellow fever.