Friday, January 6, 2023: 1:30 PM
Commonwealth Hall C (Loews Philadelphia Hotel)
A span of four months, from August to November of 1793, dictated the actions and
fate of the nearly fifty thousand inhabitants of Philadelphia.1 Yellow Fever displaced
hundreds, made thousands flee, and perpetually occupied the minds of those that
remained. It led to one of the most widely documented experiences of eighteenth-century
American city life. The events of the outbreak are recorded in detail and have been
analyzed by historians for generations. However, the city itself played a role in the way the
disease was conceptualized and responded to, the exchange of knowledge about illness,
and indeed the spreading of the disease itself. Yellow fever thrived on the landscape that
resulted from early colonial urbanization and that urbanizing environment helped people
define and react to diseases more intimately than news shared by physicians or in the
newspapers. By studying the way streets appeared as vacillating spaces – as ways to get
news but places to catch the fever and die – we see how these urban grids helped foment
the creation of a layperson’s epidemiology of yellow fever.
1 Powell, JH. Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793. Reprint of 1949
edition with a new introduction by Kenneth R Foster, Mary F Jenkins and Anna Coxe Togood. (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993
fate of the nearly fifty thousand inhabitants of Philadelphia.1 Yellow Fever displaced
hundreds, made thousands flee, and perpetually occupied the minds of those that
remained. It led to one of the most widely documented experiences of eighteenth-century
American city life. The events of the outbreak are recorded in detail and have been
analyzed by historians for generations. However, the city itself played a role in the way the
disease was conceptualized and responded to, the exchange of knowledge about illness,
and indeed the spreading of the disease itself. Yellow fever thrived on the landscape that
resulted from early colonial urbanization and that urbanizing environment helped people
define and react to diseases more intimately than news shared by physicians or in the
newspapers. By studying the way streets appeared as vacillating spaces – as ways to get
news but places to catch the fever and die – we see how these urban grids helped foment
the creation of a layperson’s epidemiology of yellow fever.
1 Powell, JH. Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793. Reprint of 1949
edition with a new introduction by Kenneth R Foster, Mary F Jenkins and Anna Coxe Togood. (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993
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