Black and White Care Workers during New York’s Yellow Fever Epidemics of the 1790s

Only two years after Philadelphia’s famously devastating yellow fever epidemic of 1793, New York experienced its own epidemics in 1795 and 1798—the latter so bad that the city’s Committee of Health was overrun on a range of fronts. Overwhelmed with sick people, dead bodies, poor people unable to find food or firewood, and orphaned babies and children, the Committee made the decision to hire a small army of more than two hundred Black and White nurses, wetnurses, and foster parents to help, particularly for those New Yorkers too poor to hire their own care workers.

Most previous scholarship on yellow fever in the founding era has tended to focus on the experiences of elites: those figures who debated the etiology of the disease, proposed solutions, and had the literacy and time to comment in letters and diaries. Instead, I focus on the experiences of those who left behind no records of their own—the frontline workers who risked their own health during the crisis, during a period when city leaders shelled out money to provide care to the poorest in a desperate city.

This paper proceeds on two fronts. The first focuses on the nurses and wetnurses who cared for people too impoverished to flee the city, as many among the wealthy had done. These male and female, Black and White nurses frequently found themselves caring for poor women, as men died at more than twice the rate of women from this disease. Second, I provide a broader view of the city’s investment in care work by contrasting the 1798 response to earlier epidemics, showing that the key difference lay in the city’s investment in care work for the poor.