Yellow Fever Epidemic in Philadelphia Kills Thousands
Poet involved
What happened
In the summer and autumn of 1793, yellow fever transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito swept through Philadelphia, then the largest city in the United States and the national capital, killing approximately 5,000 people out of a population of roughly 50,000. The epidemic caused a mass exodus from the city, paralysed the federal government, and devastated the economy. The disease was not yet understood to be mosquito-borne, and desperate remedies including the burning of gunpowder and the ringing of church bells were attempted to clear the air.
Literary impact
The 1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic produced an immediate outpouring of poetry, pamphlets, and letters from contemporary writers, and it shaped the early American literary imagination's engagement with epidemic mortality. Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799) and Ormond (1799) drew directly on the epidemic to create a specifically American Gothic fiction of disease, contagion, and urban panic. The epidemic's literary traces appear in the work of writers from Philip Freneau to later American historians of the early Republic.
Source: Wikipedia
