Black People and the Yellow Fever Epidemic

I’ll never forget the day when, as a nursing student, I was learning how to do injections. There was a fairly extensive section in our textbook, teaching us the mechanics of giving injections, and then there was a section subtitled, “Cultural Considerations.” In that section, we were “taught” about the difference in skin texture of different nationalities. White people were said to have thin skin, Asian skin was a little tougher, but the skin of African Americans, the book read, was very tough and so added pressure had to be used when giving them injections in order to penetrate their skin!

Imagine my nervousness, then, the first time I had to give one of “us” an injection! I had practiced giving injections to oranges (we all did), and had given actual injections to white people, but now I was faced with giving an injection to a person whose tough skin we had been warned about. With fear and trembling, then, I wet her skin with the alcohol, said a prayer, and jabbed her as hard as I could so as to “make sure” the injection had been properly given.

Of course that’s stupid, but I didn’t know that then. I followed what was written and believed, and that’s what people did in Philadelphia during the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793. Yellow fever was an horrendous disease, and was responsible for 4000 deaths that summer. It was the largest epidemic in this country’s history. As the death toll increased, those who had means (does this sound familiar?) were able to leave the city, and did, but poorer people were forced to stay in the city and many of them contracted the disease and died. It is estimated that about 20,000 people left the city, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. (The federal government was at that time housed in Philadelphia.)

Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the U.S. Constitution, figured prominently during the epidemic. He “bled” people and tried giving them baths four times a day. Still, the disease reigned. People were terrified; if a member of a family caught the illness, he or she was just put outdoors. Children, especially susceptible to the disease, were put outdoors and left on streets. People walked around with kerchiefs soaked with camphor around their faces, and one could hear gunshots going off because people thought the air could be purged by gunpowder.

None of these remedies worked; yellow fever is caused by mosquitoes, but nobody understood that then. So, people were sick and dying, and black people were used to nurse them to health. Dr. Rush thought and therefore taught that black people, because we came from a tropical climate, were immune to getting yellow fever! Black people were then ushered into white homes to help treat and nurse sick white people. Not only did they help nurse the sick, but our people carried and helped bury those who died from the disease! Of course, the claim of immunity to the disease was not correct, and a recorded 240 blacks died from the disease, but it is estimated that the rate of death among blacks was much higher.

When fall came, and mosquitoes left because the temperature dropped, the city began to recover. It was during this recovery time that a white man, Matthew Carey, wrote a pamphlet attacking the black community, criticizing the very blacks who had helped nurse whites back to health by saying they profited from their service and also accused them of stealing from the homes in which they worked. Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, the founders of the Black Church, responded to Carey’s accusations, saying that Carey “made more money by the sale of his pamphlets “than a dozen of the greatest extortioners among the black nurses.”

By the way, during the epidemic, Matthew Carey was one of those who fled the city during the outbreak of the epidemic.