It is February 6th. Welcome to Episode 37 of History in a Year. Today, the political fever of the summer breaks, only to be replaced by a biological nightmare. In August 1793, a mysterious killer arrives on the docks of Philadelphia. It turns eyes yellow, vomit black, and turns the bustling capital of the United States into a ghost town. We witness the collapse of the government, the brutal “cures” of Dr. Benjamin Rush, and the quiet heroism of the former slaves who stayed behind to nurse the dying.
STEPHEN: Welcome to History in a Year: America’s First 250 Years.
LEAH: Join us every single day as we journey from the Revolution of 1776 to the 250th anniversary of the United States.
STEPHEN: You can find every episode and join the discussion at PointedWords.com. I’m Stephen.
LEAH: And I’m Leah.
STEPHEN: It is February 6th. Welcome to Episode 37. Yesterday, we saw the political temperature in Philadelphia hit the boiling point with the “Citizen Genêt” affair.
LEAH: But as the summer of 1793 wore on, the actual temperature was rising too. It was a brutally hot summer. The humidity was suffocating. The marshes around Philadelphia were stagnant.
STEPHEN: And Philadelphia was a crowded city. It was the capital of the United States. 50,000 people lived there. The streets were filled with manure, rotting garbage, and buzzing flies.
LEAH: In early August, doctors started noticing something strange. It began down by the docks on Water Street. Sailors and poor immigrants were collapsing.
STEPHEN: The symptoms were terrifying. It started with a sudden, splitting headache and chills. Then came the fever. Then the skin and the whites of the eyes turned a bright, shocking yellow.
LEAH: And finally, the end stage: The Black Vomit. The stomach lining would hemorrhage, and the patient would vomit up black, coffee-ground-like blood. Then they would slip into a coma and die.
STEPHEN: At first, people thought it was just a few isolated cases. But by the end of August, people were dying by the dozen every day.
LEAH: The doctors realized with horror what it was. Yellow Fever.
STEPHEN: Now, in 1793, they had no idea what caused it. They thought it was “miasma”—bad air coming from rotting coffee beans on the wharf.
LEAH: (We know today it was mosquitoes. Specifically, the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which had hitchhiked on ships coming from the Caribbean refugee crisis).
STEPHEN: As the death toll rose, panic set in. And the reaction of the government was… to run.
LEAH: You can’t really blame them. There was no cure. If you stayed, you died.
STEPHEN: Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Everyone who can escape the city is doing so.” He packed his bags and went back to Monticello.
LEAH: Alexander Hamilton actually caught the fever! He and his wife were terrified. They managed to survive and fled to upstate New York, where they were treated like lepers. Towns wouldn’t let them enter.
STEPHEN: Even George Washington left. He went back to Mount Vernon. He essentially said, “I can’t run the country if I’m dead.”
LEAH: So, the Federal Government effectively shut down. For three months, the United States had no capital.
STEPHEN: Philadelphia became a ghost town. 20,000 people—nearly half the population—fled. The shops were boarded up. The only sound in the streets was the rumble of the “dead carts” and the drivers calling, “Bring out your dead.”
LEAH: Those who stayed behind turned to the most famous doctor in America: Dr. Benjamin Rush.
STEPHEN: Rush was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He was a genius. But his treatment for Yellow Fever was… medieval.
LEAH: He believed the body was “over-excited” and needed to be depleted. So he prescribed massive bloodletting. He would drain pints of blood from patients who were already weak.
STEPHEN: And he gave them “Ten-and-Ten.” Ten grains of calomel (which is mercury) and ten grains of jalap (a powerful laxative).
LEAH: It was basically poison. It purged the body so violently that many patients probably died from the cure rather than the disease.
STEPHEN: But Rush was brave. He stayed in the city. He saw 100 patients a day. He caught the fever himself and survived. He truly believed he was saving people.
LEAH: But the real heroes of this story aren’t the doctors. They are the nurses.
STEPHEN: As the crisis worsened, there was no one left to care for the sick. Husbands abandoned wives. Parents abandoned children. Bodies were left rotting in houses because no one would touch them.
LEAH: Dr. Rush had a theory. He believed that Black people were immune to Yellow Fever. (This was completely false, by the way).
STEPHEN: He reached out to the leaders of the Free Black community in Philadelphia—Richard Allen and Absalom Jones.
LEAH: These were two incredible men. They were former slaves who had bought their freedom. They had founded the Free African Society to help their community.
STEPHEN: Rush asked them to mobilize their people to act as nurses and gravediggers.
LEAH: Think about this. The white population treated Black people as second-class citizens every day. But now, they were begging for help.
STEPHEN: Allen and Jones discussed it. They knew it was dangerous. But they decided to help. They believed it was their Christian duty, and they also hoped that if they showed heroism, it would prove that Black people were equal citizens and help end slavery.
LEAH: So, the Free African Society stepped up. They went into the houses of the dying. They washed the bodies. They fed the orphans. They drove the carts.
STEPHEN: And they quickly realized Dr. Rush was wrong. They weren’t immune. Black nurses started getting sick and dying too.
LEAH: But they didn’t stop. They kept working. Richard Allen later wrote, “The Lord was pleased to strengthen us, and remove all fear from us.”
STEPHEN: They saved hundreds, maybe thousands of lives.
LEAH: And their reward? When the epidemic ended, a publisher named Matthew Carey wrote a pamphlet attacking them! He accused the Black nurses of stealing from the dead and charging too much money.
STEPHEN: It was a slander. Allen and Jones were furious. They published their own pamphlet—the first copyrighted work by African Americans in history—defending their honor and listing exactly what they did.
LEAH: They asked, “Is it a crime to be black?” They pointed out that while the white “Christians” were fleeing, the Black “sinners” were doing the Lord’s work.
STEPHEN: Finally, in late October, the frost came.
LEAH: The temperature dropped. The puddles froze. And the mosquitoes died.
STEPHEN: The deaths stopped almost instantly. The government slowly trickled back into the city. Washington returned in November.
LEAH: But the city was changed. 5,000 people had died. Ten percent of the population.
STEPHEN: And the political effect was real. The government realized how fragile it was. They realized they needed a safer capital, away from the crowded, disease-ridden port cities. It made the move to Washington D.C. seem even more urgent.
LEAH: The epidemic of 1793 was a horror show. But it showed the resilience of the American people—especially the ones who were given the least credit.
STEPHEN: While Philadelphia was dying, down in Georgia, a young man from Connecticut was tinkering with a machine that would change American history even more than the plague.
LEAH: His name was Eli Whitney. And he was trying to figure out an easier way to get seeds out of cotton.
STEPHEN: Join us tomorrow for Episode 38. The Cotton Gin. We see how a simple invention, meant to make life easier, accidentally revived the dying institution of slavery and set the United States on the path to Civil War.
LEAH: I’m Leah.
STEPHEN: And I’m Stephen.
STEPHEN: You can find every episode at PointedWords.com. And this… is our story.