Terror in the Streets

BRING OUT YOUR DEAD (304 pp.)--J. H. Powell--University of Pennsylvania ($3.75).

The dead lay everywhere and the living dared not come near them. They lay in the streets and in the alleys, unburied in potter's field and in houses shunned by their neighbors. Their faces were emaciated and jaundiced, their bodies so malodorous as to make the living faint. Almost half the populace of the city had fled. Of those who remained, the well dared not approach the ill. Men fell suddenly in their tracks and lay dead. Frightened, orphaned children huddled together, starving, and adults hurried by and let them starve.

In Philadelphia, that summer of 1793, plague had unloosed panic; panic had enlarged and hardened the latent core of man's inhumanity to man.

Fantastic Error. In his house on Walnut Street, Dr. Benjamin Rush plowed prayerfully through his medical library hoping to find a way to beat the yellow fever. He was a good and pious, if somewhat crotchety and hypersensitive man, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and generally considered the most eminent physician in the U.S. The "cure" he hit upon came from a clue in a manuscript on yellow fever written half a century before by a part-time physician and mapmaker. Rush's cure consisted simply of massive mercury (i.e., calomel) and jalap purges and copious bloodletting. When he tried it on a hopeless case and saw his patient recover, he used it on others, soon broadcast to the world that the yellow fever was licked.

It would be more than a century before the mosquito Aedes aegypti was pinned down by Walter Reed as the carrier of yellow fever. But even many of Rush's medical contemporaries knew that his cure was fantastically wrong. Yet diligent Dr. Rush was soon prescribing it for everyone who became ill from whatever cause, soon came to believe that all fevers were one fever and that one yellow fever. There can be no doubt that Rush killed many sufferers with his stupendous purges, and with bloodletting that often took more than half the patient's blood.

Steady Gallantry. Nevertheless, it is Rush who is the hero of Bring Out Your Dead, a ghoulishly fascinating history of Philadelphia's great plague. Historian Powell's conscientious grubbing among the records pays off with a cumulative effect of horror and heroism seldom found in the most artful fiction. As the fever took hold, government in Philadelphia, then the nation's capital, slowed down and finally stopped. When even President Washington pointedly delayed his return from Mt. Vernon, lesser men could hardly be blamed for getting away if they could.

Other cities as far away as Albany, N.Y. and Boston were afraid to let Philadelphia fugitives come near. Food ran short and starvation stepped in behind disease. Prices of coffins skyrocketed. Servants fled and the few who dared hire out as nurses set their own fees. Some doctors left town in panic and many of those who stayed died from fever and fatigue. Rush himself came down with fever twice, prescribed from his bed, recovered and went on purging and bloodletting. To a panicked population he became a living symbol of strength even as his ministrations helped some toward their graves. There were some who faithfully stayed when they could have left. Philadelphia's wealthy Mayor Clarkson organized a volunteer committee of citizens who became the city's de facto government, set up an orphanage and a hospital for the poor, brought in food and medicines, cleaned up the filthy streets and buried the dead* --more than 5,000 of the 30,000 or so Philadelphians who had remained. Such men as Merchant Stephen Girard, French Refugee Dr. Deveze and former Negro Slaves Absalom Jones and Richard Allen worked with extraordinary heroism and leadership. As Author Powell discloses their steady gallantry, they take on the stature of American heroes.

*Longfellow described some of the horror in Evangeline, but his heroine could not possibly have found her dying Gabriel in Philadelphia's Almshouse, as the poem has it. Fever victims were not admitted.

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