If the talk of the market mirrored the concerns expressed in the newspapers then there was worry about the need to make sure the corpses of fever victims were buried properly, to fill holes in Water Street with quicklime, to shut the tanneries, and don't forget "the Asiatic remedy of myrrh and black peppers." But the lead paragraph in the Federal Gazette that evening was reassuring. The editor was "happy" to pass on "the assurances of several respectable physicians, that the progress of the infectious fever... is considerably abated." Benjamin Smith quoted and endorsed the Gazette's opinion in a letter to his father. He was busy with a ship from Liverpool - the first cargo of the new goods from Britain that flooded the market every fall. Only one person he knew was sick, Richard Stansbury, the lad Rush was treating.
Then something happened on South 2nd Street dashing hopes that all was well. Dr. Hutchinson awoke with a sharp pain in his head. The night before he had dined with Secretary of State Jefferson at an estate along the Schuylkill. Famous as the former ambassador to France's wine cellar was, Hutchinson knew he did not have a hangover. Hours before he had described the fever's symptoms to Jefferson. It "begins with a pain in the head," and could end in death "from the 2nd to the 8th day."
When Rush heard the news he commented knowingly that by going out to see Jefferson and returning in the cool night air, Hutchinson had excited the infectious matter which was in his system. Rush congratulated himself for at least persuading Wistar not to accept Jefferson's invitation. Rush had dined there two weeks earlier and at least three of the secretary of state's guests suffered as the "cool air awakened the contagion influenza."
Hutchinson summoned Dr. Kuhn, considered by many the city's best practitioner, and envied by Rush because Kuhn was rich. Wealth did not preclude his being close to Hutchinson, the city's leading pro-French radical Republican. Kuhn's son-in-law was Benjamin Bache, Benjamin Franklin's grandson and the editor of the city's radical Republican newspaper, the General Advertiser. Within a few weeks Kuhn would jot down the gist of his examination of Hutchinson:
"he had gone to bed about 11 o'clock perfectly well and he indeed never felt better or in higher spirits." A few hours later, at three, he woke "with a most violent headache attended with fever." A few days before, Kuhn had told Margaret Morris that only 9 people had died of yellow fever in the city. So he quizzed Hutchinson sharply, asking several times if he had a chill, a pain in the back or uneasiness in the stomach. "He declared that he had no chill, sickness, or pain any where but in his head, which he described as excruciating." Kuhn noted that his skin was dry, his pulse "not much more frequent and not fuller than in health."
Kuhn suggested that Hutchinson take a lenient purge. The two doctors decided that cream of tartar would be best. Hutchinson's wife, who was in her ninth month of pregnancy, was an uneasy bystander during this consultation. "With great anxiety," Kuhn recalled, she asked him if her husband had yellow fever. Hutchinson saw Kuhn's embarrassment and "immediately answered there was no doubt of it. A week ago he had examined the houses along Water Street." Kuhn did not disagree.
That evening Kuhn returned to his patient. He had had one bowel movement "of a putrid nature." Once the stomach and bowels were evacuated, Kuhn treated putrid fever by using remedies that would "produce a fermentation in the stomach and correct putrefaction." He suggested wine whey and water, or lemonade, and ripe fruit. Once putrefaction was checked, he would "restore tone to the system." Hutchinson indicated he wanted a tonic and chose elixir of vitriol, sulfuric acid in wine which thanks to the zing it imparted to the mouth had been a popular tonic at least since 75 B.C. Kuhn also suggested a cold bath of which doctors with experience in the West Indies spoke so highly. When Kuhn left, Hutchinson had himself splashed with cold water and found it refreshing. He also decided he didn't feel adequately purged. He took more cream of tartar and passed a restless Saturday night.
Neither doctor thought of calomel, the mercury compound Rush was using. In his lectures at the medical school Kuhn cautioned against mercury. It would bring on incessant salivation, with hawking and spitting, "a very disagreeable companion."
That weekend Rush set out to see if calomel could save the city. On Sunday morning he reported to his wife that, "thirty-eight persons have died in eleven families in nine days in Water Street, and many more in different parts of the city." Of his patients, Richard Stansbury probably would not survive the day. Rush thought spots that appeared on his thigh - definitely not mosquito bites, were a mortal sign. He gave the lad 40 drops of laudanum, opium dissolved in wine, to make death easy. Stansbury was "a sweet youth," a little older than Rush's son Richard (a future Secretary of State.) Many of the dead had been boys between the ages of 16 and 19, so he was thankful that his sons had left the city. Richard Spain survived. Stall reported that the blockmaker would get his 8th dose of calomel. He had not yet been purged. His sweats were not natural. At least it was evident that large doses of calomel were not as poisonous as so commonly feared.
The patient Rush devoted most attention to Sunday morning was the wife of Captain Bethel, a ship's chandler on North Front Street. She was Rush's mother's step-daughter from her last marriage. Rush decided to use the new remedies on her and invited Dr. Wistar to observe the power of calomel. She was experiencing the restlessness characteristic of the early stages of the fever. Rush told her to "drink copiously of chicken water," i.e. a very weak broth, and lie in her bed. Still searching for quicker action Rush made pills different from those Stall had been giving Spain, mixing 10 grains of calomel with 15 grains of rhubarb. She took the first dose, and the two doctors did not have long to wait for a reaction. She vomited "a large quantity of bile."
More comfortable with books than with body fluids, Wistar was taken aback by the violence of the reaction, and asked, "whether it gave relief as an emetic or cathartic?" That is, was it intended to induce vomiting or purge the intestines and bowels. Rush answered that while the target was only the stomach, not the seat of putrefaction below, the puking was a good sign showing that the medicine provided "more speedy service." Wistar argued that if relief came from vomiting, a medicine with less bothersome side effects could have been used. Rush ended the discussion by giving Mrs. Bethel another dose. Wistar left and, two months later when this treatment became an issue in a controversy with Rush, Wistar recollected that he thought Mrs. Bethel looked "very unwell."
Rush later told Wistar that he waited until the pill brought on a copious purge followed by a sweat. Then he thought she was "much relieved." That same day, Sunday, Stall's patient had "two copious, foetid stools. His pulse rose immediately afterwards, and a universal moisture on his skin succeeded the cold sweat on his limbs." Rush was still cautious about the cure. That evening he received a note from Samuel Powel, the speaker of the state senate. If Rush could not allay the senators' fears, "it will be impracticable to keep the members in town." Rush scrawled on the back of Powel's note, "I know of but one certain preventative of the disorder, & that is to keep at a distance from infected
persons and places."
Meanwhile Dr. Hutchinson had not been inactive. The cream of tartar inspired three bowel movements that Sunday and the 300 pound man had gone down two flights of stairs and his back steps so that he could do it in the out house. Kuhn thought Hutchinson was too weak for such exertion, and expressed "extreme regret." During the night Hutchinson could not stop his bowels, and had eight more movements. Kuhn thought that very dangerous in a putrid fever and set out to stop it at any costs. He prescribed laudanum. To check possible over sedation from that opiate, Kuhn also prescribed one ounce of bark as a tonic.
Hutchinson passed 10 stools on Monday and had bleeding hemorrhoids. Kuhn was not sanguine, as he explained to Samuel Coates, president of the Pennsylvania Hospital, whom he met in the streets. "What would you think of him venturing down three pairs of stairs, after such a severe illness," Kuhn xplained. He would have whipped one of his own patients for such an act of impudence. Kuhn said he had had great hopes of recovery, but no more, "Hutchinson must submit to his fate." Coates told his friend Rush the news, which seemed to highlight the success of his mercurial purges.
In the letter he wrote to his wife on Tuesday, Rush reported that on Monday he was called to 12 patients, and "eight are out of danger, from the powerful operation of the medicine I mentioned in my letter of yesterday." (That letter is missing.) Rush was ready to announce a cure for yellow fever.
Not that Spain had recovered. Rush later wrote that it was "a few days" before Spain was "out of danger." At least one of the twelve to whom he gave mercury, Stansbury, had died. While prostrated by the medicine, Mrs. Bethel had never exhibited the worse symptoms of the disease. Judging by how soon they were up and about, two other survivors of the trials also had the fever lightly. Neither Dr. William McIlvaine nor the lawyer William Lewis could have had mercury before Sunday, yet by Tuesday McIlvaine credited Rush with saving his life, and Lewis was well enough to leave the city on Thursday, join his family in the country and write a witty letter to Rush.
He had saved one person that all who knew him thought would die. He had saved three others, in evident distress, from the worst symptoms of the disease. His rivals Kuhn and Hutchinson were reportedly giving up. The College of Physicians met on Tuesday to hear Dr. Redman discuss his old remedies, and Rush knew that they did not work. Delaying an announcement of a cure that clearly promised to be successful was unconscionable. A friend outside of the city had just written to him, confessing that "it is the first time in my life I ever felt my fears set in motion by any general disease." He prayed for Rush to "promote the cause of Humanity and further your masters work on Earth." Rush answered that prayer. As he played his hunch that he had the cure, his gloom was gone. "Hark! a knock at the door!" He closed a letter to his wife and was off for "the delay of a minute seems a year to a patient after a physician is sent for." One of the most enduring therapies American medical history, that would reign for upwards of 50 years, was born.
And Rush did more than cure yellow fever that weekend. No one had a keener sense of the city's crisis than Rush. Other city leaders were still bewildered. What exercised many that Monday was the arrival of the Ship Hope "crowded with 200 diseased Irish." While standing quarantine, some passengers escaped and came to the city, "to the great terror of many of the inhabitants." The mayor asked citizens "to discover" the miscreants. Governor Mifflin already had the militia on guard, to protect the city from an invasion of deserters from a Royalist French warship in New York harbor. Some 80 of them were rounded up and sent by a judge to prison until the French minister, who was then in New York, could determine their fate.
Rush paid no attention to those civic exertions to protect the city from invasion. He knew that the crisis was caring for the sick. Wistar and many others had constant headaches. Rush blamed their incautiously caring for the sick. (He blamed his own headache on too many preventatives, a vinegar headache.) Then Wistar could no longer stand the light of the sun. On Monday afternoon he asked Rush to see his patients, and Rush already had all the patients he could handle.
The city had not yet made provisions to care for the poor. The overseers' resolve to seek out the sick and give them succor failed because most of the overseers themselves began fleeing the city. Rush came to the rescue by enlisting the aid of his African American friends.
Despite briefly serving in Congress and in the Army Medical Corps during the Revolution, Rush knew he had no talent organizing men. His black friends did.
Absalom Jones along with Richard Allen, a cobbler by trade but famed as a Methodist preacher, had organized the Free African Society to foster mutual assistance for the city's blacks. Rush wrote to Allen and Jones explaining that their race was immune to the disease. (Evidently Rush did not notice that the autopsies Dr. Mitchell performed were on slaves who he supposed to have had died of yellow fever.) He asked if that "exception... which God has granted you does not lay you under an obligation to offer your services to attend the sick."
In Monday's American Daily Advertiser, writing under the pseudonym of Anthony Benezet, a Quaker emancipationist who had died in 1784, Rush quoted Dr. Lining on how blacks were not infected during the Charleston epidemics, and recalled blacks, not only to their duty to God, but to their obligation to white Philadelphians. They should help those who had "first planned their emancipation from slavery, and who have since afforded them as much protection and support, as to place them, in point of civil and religious privileges, upon a footing with themselves." Allen and Jones did not ignore their benefactor Rush, and called for a meeting of the Free African Society on Wednesday the 4th.
Philadelphia's African American community had its own medical traditions and practitioners, including a cancer doctor to whom whites went to for treatment. Early in the century Cotton Mather in Boston had learned about inoculation for small pox from slaves before he learned about its use in England. Rush endorsed the African practice of powdering a child's body with special herbs before inoculation. At the meeting of the Free African Society "after some conversation," Jones and Allen later wrote, "we found a freedom to go forth, confiding in Him who can preserve in the midst of a burning fiery furnace." They visited a family in a nearby alley. The wife lay dead, the husband ill, two children were helpless. "We administered what relief we could," they recalled, "and we applied to the overseers of the poor to have the woman buried." They visited upwards of 20 families that day and saw "scenes of woe indeed!" They found their mission, later writing, "The Lord was pleased to strengthen us, and remove all fear from us, and disposed our hearts to be as useful as possible." They went to the mayor who agreed to publish a letter in the newspapers directing those in need of a nurse to apply to Jones who would find African Americans to fill the need. Jones' and Allen's Account of the Epidemic
Rush did not attend Jones's and Allen's meeting. He was too busy spreading the good news about his remedy, an effort that was caught short by rumors sweeping the city and even a published attack on him. Many were extolling the remedies of the French physicians in the city. Having just come as refugees from the West Indies, they were assumed to have special insights into a disease thought to be tropical. Rush had tried the West Indian remedies and they had failed. He decided he must convince his colleagues that the fever in Philadelphia was "totally different from yellow fever of the West Indies." It was engendered by local filth and had unique characteristics.
Apparently anticipating that debate, Dr. William Currie discovered, with the help of Isaac Cathrall, that, contrary to Hutchinson's findings, two Frenchmen recently arrived from the West Indies had died of the fever in early August. In the newspaper Tuesday morning an anonymous attack by "Medicus" ridiculed Rush for claiming that rotting coffee caused the disease. "I have been told," Medicus taunted, "that a number of poor people, who live on Passyunk road, gathered a quantity of the damaged coffee, carried it home and are in perfect health. A strong presumption against any noxious exhalations from that source."
The College of Physicians met Tuesday night primarily to hear Dr. Redman on the yellow fever epidemic of 1762.
Rush and Redman had a great deal of respect for each others, and at the meeting they managed to finesse their radically different approaches to the disease. Redman had looked over his day book from the 1762 epidemic and spoke to patients who had survived. He recollected that doctors avoided bloodletting, emetics, laudanum and bark, preferring salts to open and cordials to restore the body. The purge he used was mild: "one ounce of salts, 2 drams of chamomile flower, and 2 drams of snake-root - these steeped together and the decoction mixed with good old spirits or brandy and vinegar." He admitted that in talking about salts, snakeroot, chamomile tea, and lemonade punches, he was not talking modern medicine. Those remedies had been gleaned by Dr. Kearsley, then the city's leading practitioner, from "an old author." But while the ancients had to be given due respect and credit, nothing he said should deter doctors from using modern methods.
After that introduction Rush spoke. He never published what he said, but judging from a letter he wrote to a Trenton doctor that same day, and from what Dr. Wistar recollects Rush telling him, he was quite sanguine. "I set down with great pleasure to inform you that the fever which has ravaged our city for some weeks past is at last arrested in its fatality. The medicine which has performed this office is calomel." He explained the medicines operation by referring to Mitchell's dissections. Calomel expelled the bile and opened the passages from the liver and gall bladder. Then Rush made his gesture to Redman. In his letter to the Trenton doctor, which Rush certainly expected to be published, he did not discard the cures of 1762 altogether. He recommended using calomel and jalap every other day if the fever continued, alternating the new remedies with "infusions of camomile flowers, snake root, bark, wine, &c., on the intermediate days." Redman reduced his talk into an essay which he gave to a printer at the end of the week. In it he endorsed Rush's methods.
Rush's colleagues knew the relative force of calomel and jalap in the dose Rush prescribed compared to other medicines. They understood that Rush was subverting established practice. And while Rush was politic enough to flatter Redman with a mention of the old remedies, in which Rush had completely lost faith, he could not help bragging. He told Wistar that calomel and jalap made the fever that had panicked the city, as manageable as an intermittent, that mild malaria so endemic since the settling of the colonies that people had learned to live with it.
Wistar had missed the meeting. Despite taking preventatives, bark every morning and evening, and following all the rules save one - he swallowed his spittle while in a sick room - Wistar got the fever. By Tuesday afternoon he had "a smart fever and delirium." By a messenger Rush ordered him to take calomel, but he didn't. He had his apprentice William Bache fetch ipecac, which worked several times. His stomach still felt heavy and sore. Then Rush came to him and did not consult. He insisted that Wistar take calomel and jalap. He did and when he was able, Wistar sent word that the purge operated and relieved him, but he didn't tell Rush that his fever returned sharply and he felt miserable.
Hutchinson and Kuhn, Rush's rivals as well as fellow professors at the University of Pennsylvania medical school, were not shy about wanting to assume the role as the city's savior, and even younger doctors sensed the opportunity. Unfortunately for his pretensions, Kuhn got sick with a fever. Not the prevailing fever Kuhn insisted. With Kuhn now unavailable, Hutchinson called in two younger doctors, William Currie and Benjamin Barton. When Currie came Tuesday evening, Hutchinson was sitting up talking with Nathaniel Falconer, the health officer of the port. Hutchinson was lucid enough to describe his own case and gave Currie permission to write about it. Currie's description of symptoms
Like Hutchinson, Currie was a former student of Rush's. The master sensed no rivalry. Indeed he had once cured Currie of a bad fever, and thought of himself as the younger man's friend. Lacking a European medical education, Currie quietly suffered Rush's overt displays of erudition, and now decided not to miss an opportunity to show his own genius.
Hutchinson told Currie that he liked the baths and vitriolic salt tonics. When he felt well, as he did then, he took no medicine but lime juice punch. In the essay Currie would send to the printer at the end of the week, Hutchinson's treatment was held up as a model. Currie did allow that six grains of calomel might be useful as a vomit in some cases, and added that that remedy was suggested by a Delaware doctor.
Like Hutchinson, Currie viewed the epidemic as a limited threat. It was virtually the same as the typhoid fever so deadly in military hospitals and prison ships during the war. Thus it could not be caught by walking the street but only by breathing infected air in a sickroom or touching infected clothing. Hutchinson may have convinced Currie not to be an alarmist like Rush, or he may have felt trapped by the book he had published that spring, An Historical Account of the Climates and Diseases of the United States of America. In it he had assured the world that epidemics in Philadelphia were a thing of the past. (To be fair, Rush thought the same thing at that time.)
Hutchinson's survival might have made Currie's essay a best seller. After Currie left him on Tuesday night, Hutchinson walked downstairs. When he came back up, his nose bled until "he was much debilitated and faint." He took 45 drops of laudanum, got to sleep, and rested well until he awoke "with sickness and great distress." Currie came back at 10 o'clock Wednesday morning and found Hutchinson with a low pulse, and cold and dry skin. His face was bloated and livid. "His mind was considerably deranged - his thirst became insatiable - he cast up all he drank, as soon as his stomach became full, with straining and noise." When he wasn't puking he was hiccupping. No matter what medicine Currie suggested, Hutchinson "obstinately" refused it, claiming that "nothing was the matter." Currie sent his manuscript to the printer anyway. (Then Dobson's printing plant burned down, destroying most of the copies of Currie's essay. Rush blamed the exertions of many to fight the fire for making the fever more virulent.)
On Thursday the 5th Rush forgot past differences and went to Hutchinson. He found the massive doctor "sitting in a chair near the head of his bed, with all his clothes on, as if he had been in his usual health." But he wasn't. Rush saw that he was delirious with a face "suffused with blood." Rush urged "a strong mercurial purge," explaining that it had saved 29 out of 30 who had taken it. Hutchinson refused for the moment, but did send one of his apprentices to Kuhn. "Rush should know," Kuhn replied sharply, "that Hutchinson had 30 stools in three days." He did not need further purging.
Rush was bitter at Hutchinson's refusal and blamed the young doctors, Currie and Barton. It wasn't there fault. Whenever Hutchinson felt better, he took great pains to make everyone believe he was completely out of danger. This was not only a case of medical hubris. It was also a matter of politics. He wanted to keep the legislature in session since the impeachment of the state comptroller John Nicholson was very much Hutchinson's pet. Not that he allowed his comrades in the legislature to visit him and risk getting the fever. That made the Republican floor leader Albert Gallatin (a future Treasury secretary under Jefferson) "very depressed," and almost ready to give up since the legislature was "so much alarmed and so unfit to attend to business."
Although many were obsessed with Hutchinson's case, many others decided not to await the outcome. Thomas Jefferson wrote on Tuesday that "everybody who can, is flying from the city." In the biweekly National Gazette that came out Wednesday, the Republican editor Philip Freneau lampooned those who fled:
On prancing steed, with sponge at nose,
From town behold Orlando fly;
Camphor and Tar where 'er he goes
Th'infested shafts of death defy -
Safe in an atmosphere of stink
No doctors get Orlando's chink.
But the refugees had no regrets. William Lewis wrote to Rush of the absurdity of staying: "A large city with the houses shut up and the streets empty except the french sailors, people of St. Domingo of all colors with their heads tied. A few citizens who you do not know posting along with sponges at their noses and the hearse constantly passing, exhibit such a melancholy picture that I never left Philadelphia with so much pleasure as yesterday nor never found such pleasure in the country as I do today - I am perfectly well, the air sweet and the trees, fields, waters, pastures and c. more beautiful than ever. How great, how pleasing the contrast!"
Still, for those who stayed business was far from being at a complete stand. President Washington scheduled cabinet meetings through the weekend. A 24 gun French ship from the East Indies, "richly laden in silks" worth 500,000 pounds sterling, docked. Some merchants returned to the city on Monday, their summer vacation over, and got to work as if nothing was happening. John Welsh, a clerk in a counting house on South Front Street, wrote to his boss Robert Ralston, who was still in Wilmington, that he was too busy to notice "the malady so alarming,... being engaged all the morning." After a hot humid weekend the wind shifted to the north, Welsh expected that would "expedite" the departure of the fever.
Then on Wednesday he noticed, that it was like "Sunday, little doing, sometime perfectly quiet, so many have fled this scene of death." But Welsh still hoped the change in weather would tell, and he heard that "several persons are likely to recover." Hutchinson was "mending." His neighbor Ebenezer Hazard, secretary of the North American Insurance Company, opined "that the distemper is decreasing very fast." Benjamin Smith remained an optimist, explaining to his father on Wednesday that while "the disorder still continues pretty rife," it was less virulent. Dr. Say said that "in many cases it now exhibits an intermitting appearance." Margaret Morris no longer saw corpses carried past her door.
When Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton sent a note Friday morning informing the president that he would miss the scheduled cabinet meeting because he feared that he was "in the first stages of the prevailing fever," Washington expressed "extreme concern" but shared the optimism then current. Noting that "the malignity of the disorder is so much abated, as with proper & timely applications not much is to be dreaded," he hoped Hamilton and his wife could still make it for dinner.
Rush was convinced that his medicines were in a large part responsible for the lack of deaths. "Fewer deaths have occurred I believe this day than on several days last week, and yet many hundred people more have the fever now than had it last week," he explained to his wife on Thursday. He also observed that those with the fever who were not treated invariably died. He gave a purge to many going into the country, "to subdue the disease if it should break out." However, Rush was so confident of his ability to control the disease that he no longer recommended that people leave the city. "I now advise them to remain where they are, to avoid going out of their houses, and to send for a mercurial physician as soon as they are infected," he wrote to his wife on Friday, and could even joke about the crisis. "No other metal in a physician's head will do any good now, not even gold any more than lead. My medicine has got the name of an inoculating powder, for it as certainly and as universally deprives the yellow fever of its mortality as inoculation does the smallpox."
With his five apprentices making and distributing pills of calomel and jalap or rhubarb, Rush tirelessly tried to stop the epidemic. He slept four hours a night. He told his wife that "out of 100 persons who have taken [mercury] from me on the first day, not one has died. The deaths which now occur are chiefly of poor people who have no doctors, or of respectable people who are in the hands of quacks or of the enemies of mercury."
As Hutchinson lay dying, Wistar recovered, which Rush counted a major victory for mercurial purges. He tried to elicit a testimonial for his cure. He went to the extreme of suggesting to his languishing colleague that it was he, Rush, who faced imminent death, and he worried about who would carry on his work. "You cannot die now, Doctor," Wistar replied tactfully. "The pleasure of your discovery must like a cordial keep you alive."
For the moment Wistar kept to himself what remedies he thought most beneficial. He appreciated the power of calomel, but as he recovered from a delirium he became conscious of a wonderful cold draft from a window left open in his room. He instructed his students to keep him cool. When the breeze from the window was too hot, the young men took turns fanning their master. To that, Wistar attributed his recovery.
While not a few found comfort in statistics showing decreased mortality, there was no official count of the sick and dead published. So panic was easily fueled by anecdotes. A young woman who nursed the sick in Water Street got sick herself and neighbors refused to take her in. She lay in the street where an alderman found her and "had her sent in a cart to the city hospital, where she was refused admittance, and was near that place found dead in the cart next morning." The report that the Stephens family on Chestnut Street between 2nd and 3rd Streets lost 7 of 10 members stripped John Welsh of optimism, "so victorious is this dreadful disease over the most efficacious administrations of our physicians."
In this atmosphere of hope, confusion, and dread, for many the fate of the city increasingly seemed to hinge on Hutchinson's recovery. On Thursday he lapsed into a coma. The city's gloom increased, though there was still enough political venom in the city to cause the clerk of the not-yet-to-be-impeached John NIcholson to crow: "Dr. Hutchinson is given over by the physicians. I believe he is thus dead or dying, thank God for it." Nicholson's clerk even wanted the comptroller to leave his farm, come to the city and rout the demoralized enemy. Of course the legislature moved quickly toward adjournment, postponing impeachment proceedings.
Then William West, a Quaker member of the Assembly, stood and cited "the duty of a people professing Christianity to humble themselves before the Judge of all the Earth, at all time, and particularly at this awful period." He proposed a law closing the theaters in the state permanently. Hallam's American Company of Comedians did close on August 23, so there could be no pretense of the proposal being a health measure. Every legislator knew what West was up to. In 1789 the Revolutionary War law banning theaters was repealed despite protests from the religious community, including a procession led by the Episcopal bishop William White. What better time to reopen the issue than when god was showing his wrath. No one seconded West's resolution.
Quakers like West might believe, as his co-religionist Margaret Morris explained in a letter, that there was no escape if God's rod was "commissioned to strike us among the rest," but no other legislator wanted to waste time in the city as the fever spread. They adjourned after giving the governor new powers to stop and quarantine ships. There was news of yellow fever in Barbados and other islands. The governor ordered a quarantine of ships from the West Indies and moved out to Germantown.
Hutchinson lived through Friday in a coma. He died Saturday. His wife went into labor that same day, and bore him his fifth child, a girl. Nicholson's clerk gloated. Hutchinson's huge body began to "mortify before he died," and had to be buried in a hurry that night, while his allies in "iniquity... galloped out of town." Hutchinson's friends were inconsolable. His obituary was in newspapers all over the country. Within two weeks a poem about the fallen Republican hero was published. "For five days no two or more persons met when the first interrogatory was not 'How does Hutchinson.'" the young editor Samuel Smith wrote to his sister. "Now he is no more - but I cannot dwell on the gloomy subject." Hutchinson had given Smith courage to stay in the city. Smith was aware of Rush's cures and believed the fever's "virulence has... been greatly subdued," but as he sealed his letter, a carriage waited to take him to Lancaster 60 miles away.
Rush did not view Hutchinson's death as a civic tragedy. "It is remarkable," Rush wrote to his wife, "that he denied the existence of a contagious fever in our city for above a week after it appeared among us, and even treated the report of it with contempt and ridicule. The reason, I fear, was the first account of it came from me."
Rush remained. Before retiring at night he was in the habit of reading psalms in order. He opened the Bible to the 52nd Psalm: "Thy tongue deviseth mischiefs; like a sharp razor, working deceitfully.... God shall likewise destroy thee for ever, he shall take thee away, and pluck thee out of thy dwelling place, and root thee out of the land of the living." It reminded him of Hutchinson. "Poor fellow!" Rush wrote to his wife. "He died as well as lived my enemy."
The next day, Dr. McIlvain, whom he had successfully treated with mercury, told Rush that Kuhn insisted that calomel and jalap only cured remittent fevers, not yellow fever. Rush remarked in his notebook that "there was more malignity in his heart towards me than was in the contagion of yellow fever." With God's help he could save his city. What stood in his way were the jealousy and ignorance of his colleagues.
Note: Modern historians are prone to quote letters written by John Adams in his old age to illuminate historical events that usually Adams never experienced. Although Vice President during the epidemic, he left Philadelphia when Congress adjourned, months before the epidemic started, and he didn't return until Congress returned a month after the epidemic ended. His assertion that the death of Hutchinson saved the Republic from a certain revolution was roundly ridiculed by contemporaries, yet it pops up in histories of the epidemic. Here is link to Timothy Pickering's 1824 review of the publication of some of Adams' letters. Pickering was in Philadelphia during the epidemic and lost a son to it:
A link to Pickering's Review see page72.
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