“Bring Out Your Dead!”: Philadelphia’s 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic By Saamiya Syed In the United States of the COVID-19 Pandemic, the novel Coronavirus was not the only enemy. As it began to spread and daily claim the lives of hundreds of Americans, state and federal government responses were disjointed and inconsistent. Conflicting face mask policies and lock-down measures fueled public distrust in their leadership. Despite a common, indiscriminate, and potentially fatal threat, the American people and their institutions failed to unite. Instead, the pandemic seemed to deepen existing social and racial divisions, and to intensify an already polarized climate to the point that the scientific and medical establishments became politicized in public discourse. As a result, Americans could not even agree on the nature or extent of the threat they faced as it ravaged the nation. In this article, I will examine a historical public health crisis – the Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 – as a way to contextualize the divisive effects of the current pandemic. I want to suggest that certain social dynamics that emerged during the city’s outbreak might be seen as precedents. for those the United States experienced more recently. There are clear differences – medicine, for example, has progressed substantially since then – but there are critical points of comparison that suggest the nation’s dysfunctional response to the pandemic has cultural foundations that go back to its early years. This can be seen in the way the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 heightened Philadelphia’s social and racial divisions and how medical stakeholders became embroiled in the conflict. Arthur Thomas Robinson’s 1993 dissertation, The Third Horseman of the Apocalypse: A Multi-Disciplinary Social History of the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Philadelphia uses a behavioral pattern model that, I would argue, suggests the propriety of a comparison between the 1793 Epidemic and COVID-19. 52
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