On the morning after he wrote the letter to Rodgers, Rush must not have been feeling well. The postscript he added Friday morning
to the letter he wrote to his wife Thursday evening was longer than usual and more somber. There were clouds lowering, but he was sure it would not rain. "Not a ray of alleviation of the present calamity breaks into our city from any quarter. All is a thick and melancholy gloom." Everyone prayed for a change of weather. Rush thought heavy rain would purify the atmosphere. Cold, and it was getting colder with highs in the 60s over the weekend, was problematical. It would be good for those already sick, but could debilitate the healthy. Frost was another matter. That had long been god's specific against autumnal fevers. But there was no sign of frost. Rush thought the only blessing was that, "men now talk of God and of his providence who appeared scarcely to believe in either two months ago."
An admonition in a newspaper probably caught the tone of many sermons given at the time. Even if the sickness should end, argued the anonymously written letter, "unless the moral causes cease to operate, it will return again, or something more terrible in its stead." Citizens must remember the Sabbath and stop visiting tippling houses, "singing of profane songs," playing instruments and cards and keeping servants at work on that day. The greatest sin of the New Theatre was that "many tradesmen were employed on several Sabbath days successively in working on the building." The writer quoted Leviticus 26:21: "And if ye walk contrary unto me, and will not harken unto me; I will bring seven times more plagues upon you according to your sins." One preacher attacked the New Theater as "a sink of sin... appropriated to the service of the devil."
Rush tried to rally his diminishing strength and at least visit patients near his house. During one of his first visits, where two fever victims were confined in one small room, he suddenly sunk down upon a bed, with a giddiness in his head. It continued for a few minutes, and was "succeeded by a fever." He went back to his house, and wrote to his wife that the "slight attack" went off "in an hour or two with a gentle sweat."
He assured her that he stayed home "in as much health and spirits as usual, prescribing constantly for such persons as I was unable to visit, particularly for the poor." He blamed his indisposition on doing too much the day before, "I was forced by the entreaties and tears of persons who stopped my carriage in the streets to visit many more people than I had intended...." He seemed to view with equanimity the consequences of his indisposition. Coxe and Fisher had completed his visits, except they could not get to Father Fleming, the Catholic priest, in time. Rush feared he would die, "in consequence of my inability to visit him at the usual hour. The delay of a day, nay of a single hour, in administering the remedies proper in this disorder, is often attended with irretrievable consequences." (Fleming died on Sunday.) That said, he was quick to assure Julia that without the new remedies the fever would have been as deadly at the plague.
While Rush seemed too exhausted to rethink his remedies, other doctors in the city rethought theirs. Dr. Hodge thought the disease had changed its character no less than four times, and so he adjusted his remedies. Medical historians might later chastise Rush for concocting the worst of treatments for yellow fever, but on the scene more doctors began to appreciate the relief purging and bleeding afforded the patient. At the end of October Ebenezer Hazard wrote a paragraph on treating the fever for a New England newspaper. He most likely consulted with Hodge before writing it, and far from ridiculing Rush, Hazard wrote, "it seems now to be agreed that bleeding and purging, according to the state of the pulse, are necessary in the beginning; and bark, wine, and nourishing food, as soon as the disorder is checked." Purging and moderate bleeding were prescribed by all but French doctors. Even William Currie began using Rush's methods until he himself got sick.
On the streets of Philadelphia the trouble was not the treatment but the fact that in the first week of October there were some 8,000 sick, and at times only two American and a handful of French doctors able to treat them. (Among the many sick doctors, only Dr. Graham, who had come back to the city from New York, subsequently died.)
At last Rush's house boy Peter "yielded to the disorder." Despite the frown on Peter's face, Rush slept well and crowed to his wife in the morning: "How precious is sound sleep in a city where thousands now pass wearisome and sleepless nights! How great is the gift of life in a place where upwards of a hundred fellow creatures die every day!" He did little that day, save see that Peter was bled. He was amused at the boy's being "terrified with the fear of dying," and Rush "endeavored to improve upon his fears by setting before him his wicked life."
The city received a jolt of optimism when the Federal Gazette announced the arrival of a French doctor named Robert, who promised to serve the poor "gratis - they are Americans, they are the brethren of the French patriots." The merchant Miers Fisher, who was one of his first patients, found his methods "easy and simple, differing exceedingly from Dr. Rush's practice." "He reprobates the mercurial purges and violent bleeding," Fisher told John Welsh, "he makes great use of barley water, tamarinds, and a gentle purge compound of manna, tamarinds and four other ingredients." In all patients, Fisher said, he had "met with uncommon success."
One newspaper correspondent urged the adoption of "the French mode of living;" less meat and more soups, avoid brandy, spirits or strong wine, and dilute beer with water, avoid black and green teas, and eat vegetables and fruits. "The effects are visible - a cheerful equal mind, and a constant flow of spirits...."
That newspaper chatter did little for the bewildered city. Thomas Bedwell, a "gentleman" who lived on Front Street, distributed medicine to the poor, and he took in "a poor woman, a stranger, with her child 4 months old, both friendless and destitute, having lost her husband." He had never done that before. "All things seem now like a dream," he wrote, "this day I call to see my friend, tomorrow I hear of his death, this has been the case in continual succession until I feel myself sunk down and totally bewildered by melancholy events."
Although he cited his missing a visit as reason enough for a patient to die, Rush encouraged people to carry-on without him by liberally using mercurial purges. The fully recovered Margaret Morris treated her maid Sally, who seemed to have a mild case, "as Dr. Rush directs." Then she began vomiting "blackish stuff and the discharge downwards was the same, and then she vomited blood." Morris "began to make experiments." She had Sally lick salt and alum and then quenched the resulting thirst with elixir of vitriol, vinegar and water. Her discharges stopped for 24 hours. Then she started vomiting blood again, "It came out like a teapot." Morris went to her neighbor Rush and got medicine to stop the vomiting, but the bleeding continued and Sally's mouth, tongue and lips were as black as ink. Morris gave her bark, and she recovered. The convalescing Rush told Morris that the spontaneous bleeding cured Sally.
While Sally was sick, William, an apprentice who was staying with Margaret, was seized. She started him with purges and Fisher stopped in to bleed a pound of blood out of him in the morning and another pound that night. He seemed weak but better. No sooner were the patients in her own house stabilized than Benjamin Smith reported that his three servants were ill. With medicines in hand Margaret went to Front Street and purged everyone. Then the two Smith children felt ill.
Back on Walnut Street Margaret's cousin succumbed to the fever. "Practice had made me bold," Margaret later wrote. She gave her cousin a purging powder, and had her bled. Then the two grandchildren living with her got sick. She had not thought the Smith children truly touched with yellow fever, but she had no doubts about the Morris orphans. She asked Rush how to proportion the medicine to the children and dosed them both. One recovered quickly the other didn't. Then the two blacks she had hired to take care of Sally and William got sick and left.
With all the sickness, she wrote, "it seemed as if my heart had died within me." To care for all she decided to spend the days at the Smith house and nights in her own house. Benjamin Smith managed to find doctors to see his ill servants. They too had faith in Rush's methods and the servant with the most obstinate fever was bled to the point where he was "low indeed" and "cold at the extremities" through the night. On Wednesday October 9th a doctor and Margaret Morris both visited in quick succession. The doctor allowed the three servants "restorative medicine." "My mother-in-law, who has had much experience in the disorder,..." Smith wrote to his father, "thinks the crisis is past with both and they will do very well." Of the children only his daughter didn't get well. She "can't be got to take medicine but with difficulty nor then in sufficient quantity but we shall try her again."
Benjamin was the calm point in the storm, reporting with scant emotion that he was able to do as much as he commonly did. But his wife Debby was fatigued, a condition that was no longer dismissed lightly. She "has taken some medicine which I think will prevent any bad consequences." Her mother Margaret had come to have a great belief in bleeding. For a day she sent for a bleeder in vain - eight were unable to come. She never was so bold to try herself. Finally one came and Debby was bled.
On October 5 Benjamin's father sent down a bundle of dried herbs that he thought might be useful, including "tanzy, wormwood of two sorts, one Italian, cardes, balm, isip, pennyroyal." He recommended chewing the wormwood to prevent infection and told of a Frenchman who feared that his servant had the fever. He "was very earnest in inquiry after cardes benedictus or the blessed thistle." It had been hailed in 1578 as a cure for the plague, and the servant recovered with only a blister and the herb given as a tea. There's no evidence that Benjamin Smith used the herbs. He respected his mother-in-law's respect for Rush's methods, which he knew was borne of her observation of several cases.
Historians try to distinguish between home remedies and doctor's medicine, contrasting the good works of matriarchs like Margaret Morris with the insensitive prescriptions of doctors like Rush. Actually Rush worked well with the mothers of the city. Rush was overjoyed when another widow visited him and told how she cured herself with several mercurial purges and by having herself bled seven times in six days.
Yet the chief solace in that most deadly week of the epidemic was not Rush but religion. On October 5 Rev. Helmuth visited "about thirty" sick people, 12 were near death. In the evening as he walked through the empty streets, he achieved a measure of ecstacy: "Blessed evening - blessed awful solitude - The thought: The city is distressed - so many families are distressed - but the Lord looks down upon the distressed, and who would not willingly be in a place on which the Lord looks down in mercy? This thought had so much comfort for me, that I forgot all the calamity around me...." Helmuth shared his insight with all who would listen."Talked to two Quakers," he wrote a few days later, "and tried to convince them that this was a very blessed time for Philadelphia. One of them was moved and started to cry."
Rush did not recover his health quickly and judging from letters to his wife increasingly sought solace in religion. That his "divine Master performed many or perhaps most of his laborious acts of love to mankind with a much weaker body" kept him "from repining." He sent his wife "a sweet little psalm by Watts" that he cut out of the newspaper. The English divine's rendition of the 41st Psalm had timely language: "Blest is the man whose bowels move,/ And melt with pity to the poor,...."
No amount of religion could ease his constant worry about the renown of his methods. He agonized over others misinterpreting it. "They know but little of the obligations of Christianity who give such a worthless reptile as I am the least credit for any one exertion in the cause of humanity, for I profess to believe in and to imitate a Saviour who did not risk but who gave his life, not for his friends but his enemies." He scored one coup when Rebecca Blodget, the daughter of Dr. Rev. William Smith past provost of the university and possessing a considerable following both religious and political, recovered using his remedies. Counterbalancing that triumph was that Mayor Clarkson's wife and Mrs. Kepple were "bad subjects for the disease and unfortunately both my patients."
On Sunday October 6 Rush managed to visit three patients. including Dr. Griffitts. He had been sick early in September, but this time he was worse. Rush was unstinting in ordering Griffitts bled, except during one visit. He found the patient with a "full and tense" pulse and was about to summon the bleeder when he noticed that the window was closed. After opening it, the cool air eased the pulse in 10 minutes. Rush ordered a purge instead and had Griffitts bled again that evening.
Rush resumed his regular practice on October 8, election day. His letter to his wife began with a praise to God from Lamentations 3:23. He claimed he had never had a better night's sleep and in an instant was off to see patients. Rush never mentioned if he voted. Only 567 did in the city. The usual poll was at least 2000. Mifflin, who at the beginning of the year seemed in trouble, won handily in the distracted city and state. (This despite rumblings that Mifflin had helped cause the epidemic. "Do I not know that the governor of our state is a man who has not god in all his thoughts," Julia wrote to her husband after hearing a rousing sermon in Princeton.)
Rush's first patient on Tuesday morning was Timothy Pickering's son. In early October Pickering had written to a friend in Massachusetts that he had "such confidence in the safety of Dr. Rush's practice that my fear of the disease is greatly abated." He and his family were careful to follow Rush's strictures. "We eat largely of bread and vegetables, little or no butter, but molasses and honey instead thereof, barley soup, and very little meat. We drink no wine but use porter much diluted with water, tea, coffee and chocolate. And we are careful to keep the body gently open. Castor oil we find most convenient for this purpose, taken about once a week." Most people died, he thought, from want of care. "Many have been abandoned by their friends, and left in the hands of negroes and other ignorant mercenaries."
A few days later a maid and his six year old son Edward got the fever. The maid recovered while groaning "loudly" about the purging and puking. After getting the same medicine, his son didn't recover, and "... he refused to take anything and in answer to his mother's importuning said his throat was stopped," Pickering wrote to Rush and asked if glysters were in order. That night mother and father administered three and at sunrise the boy passed a stool. The fourth glyster "was followed by several small evacuations," which seemed to relieve him. Then the boy puked dark matter. Before he had only puked while being bled. Pickering thought the "critical moment" had arrived and begged Rush to hasten his visit. Pickering and Rush did not record the last measures they tried before the boy died. Unlike a grocer who wrote to Rush blaming his daughter's death on "the drastic operation of the mercurial purges," Pickering did not blame Rush.
Unlike other times his return to the fray did not seem to invigorate Rush. When he wrote that evening he mainly reported depressing news. Two more allies, Drs. Parke and Physick, were sick. A story that an old enemy had called for him as he lay dying proved false. The old enemy had expressly instructed that if he got sick only a French doctor should be called. He died that morning. Samuel Meredith was sick again and Rush sent Fisher out to see him. Dr. Redman's daughter was "in danger." Her father at least was well and "full of praises to God and love to the whole human race." In closing his evening letter to Julia he added that she could not use any of the dresses in the house because the whole place was so infected. "Nearly an hundred people discharge their infected breath in it every day, for many people in the first stage of the disorder are able to walk about and to call upon a physician." Before he retired he read the 102nd Psalm:
In the morning many asked for him. Dr. Mease, himself "most violently attacked again," urged Rush to see his neighbor Daniel Offley, who had been recovering but "presumed too much on it and it threw him back again." Rush was too weak to go, writing to his wife that he declined all calls that day.
In his memoir his recollection of that day, October 9, was different. He recalled visiting many patients "and, as the day was warm, I lessened the quantity of my clothing. Towards evening I was seized with a pain in the back, which obliged me to go to bed at eight o'clock." His most vivid recollection of what happened after that is a November 8 letter he wrote to Julia: "At one o'clock, I was attacked in a most violent manner with all the symptoms of the fever. Seldom have I endured more pain. My mind sympathized with my body. You and my seven dear children rushed upon my imagination and tore my heartstrings in a manner I had not experienced in my former illness. A recovery in my weak and exhausted state seemed hardly probable. At 2 o'clock I called up Marcus and Mr. Fisher, who slept in the adjoining room. Mr. Fisher bled me, which instantly removed my pains, and then gave me a dose and an half of the mercurial medicine. It puked me several times during the night and brought off a good deal of bile from my stomach. The next morning it operated downwards and relieved me so much that I was able to sit up long enough to finish my letter to you."
He began that letter, "after a comfortable night's rest I rose this morning at 7 o'clock and have ever since been in the midst of sickness and distress." He decided not to describe how serious his attack had been so that she would not feel compelled to come into the city to nurse him. However, he didn't go so far as to claim he visited patients. He only mentioned that there just seemed always to be "eight of ten people" in his house.
That afternoon his fever returned sharply, and he felt very tired, which he thought an alarming symptom. Fisher bled him which revived him. His letter to Julia that night was depressed, noting the great mortality among the poor, especially servants. Another Catholic priest who had been his patient died, "and I fear suffered from my being obliged to desert him." Redman's daughter and Dr. Griffitts were better. It was the shortest letter he had written in the relative quiet of the evening.
The next morning he mentioned the return of his fever to Julia. And could manage only to write a few lines, perhaps of self diagnosis: "It belongs to the disease to end in an intermittent in many people,... and what is unfortunate, it will not bear the bark." He no longer saw patients, and even avoided rooms where patients had been. He decided to avoid contagion at all costs. Then on the night of the 11th, as he explained in his November 8 letter, "I fell into just such a fainty fit as I had about the crisis of my pleurisy in the year 1788. I called upon Marcus, who slept in the room with me, for something to drink and afterwards for some nourishment, which revived me in a few minutes, so that I slept well the remaining part of the night. One or two nights afterwards he gave me something to eat, which prevented a return of the fainty fits."
It would be difficult to exaggerate the miserable condition of the city. A letter said to have been written by Rush on the 10th was widely paraphrased in newspapers around the country: "the disorder was now past the art of man or medicine to cure, that nothing but the power of the Almighty could stop it." No one disputed that assessment. Mrs. William Smith had every reason to see a ray of hope. She had just nursed her daughter Rebecca Blodget to health.Yet she wrote to a friend, "it is not possible for me to pass the streets without walking in a line with the dead, passing infected houses, and looking into open graves.... I don't know what to write; my head is gone, and my heart is torn to pieces."
From Lansdowne, a stately mansion outside the city, the British diplomat George Hammond reported to London that there was no appearance of the epidemic's "ravages being checked.... It is certainly one of the most malignant that has ever visited in any age or nation." The city's Episcopal churches finally closed due to illnesses of clerks and sextons.
The fever even invaded the house where Girard forgot the horrors of Bush Hill and lived as if nothing were amiss. After dinner on the 9th Seguin, the young clerk visiting Girard, suddenly felt "bad with the collick and the head ache." He feared he was getting "the plague," and wrote that "it hurted me very much, for I thought if I should be sick they would send me to Bush, to the ospickle." Seguin managed to pull himself together and after helping close Girard's store at 7 p.m., amused himself "with a young Creole,... about 17 years of age and she told of all the accidents that arrive her in her voyage, and she told me she was boarded by 2 privateers, and that they searched them every where...." The next day he had the fever badly. Girard did not send him to the hospital but decided to try a water cure and treat him with a "grand lavage."
Seeing no end in sight some finally fled the city. Others finally left because all their reasons for staying were dead. John Todd's father died, then his mother succumbed and died on October 12. John let his brother take him to the country, to Dolley and his boys. To preserve them John set up his own quarantine, taking a separate room and spending most of the time outdoors away from everyone.
Yet a few came into the city. John Welsh took his fever while on an errand outside the city. He stayed there to recover and when well enough on the 12th came back to get to work. He found the city a "mournful place." The banks were still open so he was able to make deposits to cover his firm's notes. He made visits and was gratified to find the mayor's wife "in a very fair way of recovering." The city was "equally (if not worse) as bad as when I left it, and a great deal more gloomy - little doing, and a few people in the streets." His chief worry was that John Swanwick would die before making good on a $3,000 debt to the firm. There was a pervasive worry in business circles that with so many dying so quickly without a chance to arrange for paying debts that "great derangements will take place and many great losses must be sustained."
The federal customs house had moved to Chester. After payments were made on federal government securities in early October, treasury department register Joseph Nourse left. His head clerk Joseph Dawson became the highest federal official still on the job. He had stayed because his wife had just had a baby and was not yet strong enough to travel. On the 10th he prepared to leave, then his sister-in-law died. While breaking the news to his wife and her mother, he broke down and was unable to leave the city or go to the office. A few clerks remained. Then Thomas O'Hara died, five days after "taking the scent" when he stumbled into a coffin that fell from a cart onto the street. With his death no one wanted to enter the treasury offices.
Only when the post office, which had moved to 4th and Arch Streets, opened daily at 3p.m. were there signs of life. A crowd always gathered for letters. As for the common people, there was no work for those who remained, prompting one correspondent in the Gazette to urge that supplies being sent from the country be used to pay laborers to continue their usual work. Idleness would increase their propensity to get the fever; work would keep their bodies "in a due state of perspiration." However the Committee was in no state to undertake such social engineering. An October 11 letter in a New York newspaper noted that many members were "indisposed, so that the remainder with their multiplied engagements, have indeed a laborious time of it." On the 11th only eight men joined Mayor Clarkson at City Hall. In the past week the number of orphans to care for had doubled to 70. Daniel Offley who had volunteered expressly to supervise their care died that day.
In a October 12 letter to his father, Benjamin Smith contrasted the recovery of his children and wife ("tho weakened in consequence of the treatment she has undergone") and his own good health with the death of "such a man as D. Offley,... how mysterious and unsearchable are the ways of Providence." Throughout the epidemic Smith thought he charted a rational course. Deaths were few in his immediate neighborhood; he stayed mostly in his house; he did receive visitors who had been among the sick, but when he paid visits to the sick he was careful to go only when they were well on their way to recovery. After closing his letter to his father, Smith felt sharp pains in his head and went to bed with a fever. Debby summoned her mother, who thought he looked much like her son John had at first. She sent for Rush, but he was confined and his apprentices all out. Dr. Mease was "too ill to bespoken to." Benjamin mentioned Parke, but he was ill, and then Dr. James, but he was too weak to practice. James recommended Cathrall, who decided that Smith could not have yellow fever because his eyes were not red. Margaret knew he had it and told Cathrall that she would consult Dr. Rush. On the way to Walnut Street she met one of Rush's apprentices who promptly bled and purged Smith.
It rained Saturday night and there was a "strong northwest wind during the whole night." Henry Helmuth wrote, "Perhaps God wants to help this poor city and bring back its health by this wind." The previous week 130 members of his congregation had been buried. Rush did not notice the change in weather. The city had lost his services. "My fellow citizens, I hope will excuse me," he wrote to Julia on the morning of the 12th, "especially when they recollect how often my premature exertions have brought back my fever." On the 13th he wrote to her that he hoped his conduct "will not be offensive to my divine Master..., to go further than I have done would be I fear to 'tempt the Lord' to preserve me out of the ordinary means of his holy and wise providence." The bedridden doctor did no more than react to the mail and think about his family. "I have thought more of you and the dear children within these two days," he wrote to Julia, "than I have done for six weeks." He asked her how many teeth their baby Mary had.
go to chapter 11
Back on Walnut Street Margaret's cousin succumbed to the fever. "Practice had made me bold," Margaret later wrote. She gave her cousin a purging powder, and had her bled. Then the two grandchildren living with her got sick. She had not thought the Smith children truly touched with yellow fever, but she had no doubts about the Morris orphans. She asked Rush how to proportion the medicine to the children and dosed them both. One recovered quickly the other didn't. Then the two blacks she had hired to take care of Sally and William got sick and left.
With all the sickness, she wrote, "it seemed as if my heart had died within me." To care for all she decided to spend the days at the Smith house and nights in her own house. Benjamin Smith managed to find doctors to see his ill servants. They too had faith in Rush's methods and the servant with the most obstinate fever was bled to the point where he was "low indeed" and "cold at the extremities" through the night. On Wednesday October 9th a doctor and Margaret Morris both visited in quick succession. The doctor allowed the three servants "restorative medicine." "My mother-in-law, who has had much experience in the disorder,..." Smith wrote to his father, "thinks the crisis is past with both and they will do very well." Of the children only his daughter didn't get well. She "can't be got to take medicine but with difficulty nor then in sufficient quantity but we shall try her again."
Benjamin was the calm point in the storm, reporting with scant emotion that he was able to do as much as he commonly did. But his wife Debby was fatigued, a condition that was no longer dismissed lightly. She "has taken some medicine which I think will prevent any bad consequences." Her mother Margaret had come to have a great belief in bleeding. For a day she sent for a bleeder in vain - eight were unable to come. She never was so bold to try herself. Finally one came and Debby was bled.
On October 5 Benjamin's father sent down a bundle of dried herbs that he thought might be useful, including "tanzy, wormwood of two sorts, one Italian, cardes, balm, isip, pennyroyal." He recommended chewing the wormwood to prevent infection and told of a Frenchman who feared that his servant had the fever. He "was very earnest in inquiry after cardes benedictus or the blessed thistle." It had been hailed in 1578 as a cure for the plague, and the servant recovered with only a blister and the herb given as a tea. There's no evidence that Benjamin Smith used the herbs. He respected his mother-in-law's respect for Rush's methods, which he knew was borne of her observation of several cases.
Historians try to distinguish between home remedies and doctor's medicine, contrasting the good works of matriarchs like Margaret Morris with the insensitive prescriptions of doctors like Rush. Actually Rush worked well with the mothers of the city. Rush was overjoyed when another widow visited him and told how she cured herself with several mercurial purges and by having herself bled seven times in six days.
Yet the chief solace in that most deadly week of the epidemic was not Rush but religion. On October 5 Rev. Helmuth visited "about thirty" sick people, 12 were near death. In the evening as he walked through the empty streets, he achieved a measure of ecstacy: "Blessed evening - blessed awful solitude - The thought: The city is distressed - so many families are distressed - but the Lord looks down upon the distressed, and who would not willingly be in a place on which the Lord looks down in mercy? This thought had so much comfort for me, that I forgot all the calamity around me...." Helmuth shared his insight with all who would listen."Talked to two Quakers," he wrote a few days later, "and tried to convince them that this was a very blessed time for Philadelphia. One of them was moved and started to cry."
Rush did not recover his health quickly and judging from letters to his wife increasingly sought solace in religion. That his "divine Master performed many or perhaps most of his laborious acts of love to mankind with a much weaker body" kept him "from repining." He sent his wife "a sweet little psalm by Watts" that he cut out of the newspaper. The English divine's rendition of the 41st Psalm had timely language: "Blest is the man whose bowels move,/ And melt with pity to the poor,...."
No amount of religion could ease his constant worry about the renown of his methods. He agonized over others misinterpreting it. "They know but little of the obligations of Christianity who give such a worthless reptile as I am the least credit for any one exertion in the cause of humanity, for I profess to believe in and to imitate a Saviour who did not risk but who gave his life, not for his friends but his enemies." He scored one coup when Rebecca Blodget, the daughter of Dr. Rev. William Smith past provost of the university and possessing a considerable following both religious and political, recovered using his remedies. Counterbalancing that triumph was that Mayor Clarkson's wife and Mrs. Kepple were "bad subjects for the disease and unfortunately both my patients."
On Sunday October 6 Rush managed to visit three patients. including Dr. Griffitts. He had been sick early in September, but this time he was worse. Rush was unstinting in ordering Griffitts bled, except during one visit. He found the patient with a "full and tense" pulse and was about to summon the bleeder when he noticed that the window was closed. After opening it, the cool air eased the pulse in 10 minutes. Rush ordered a purge instead and had Griffitts bled again that evening.
Rush resumed his regular practice on October 8, election day. His letter to his wife began with a praise to God from Lamentations 3:23. He claimed he had never had a better night's sleep and in an instant was off to see patients. Rush never mentioned if he voted. Only 567 did in the city. The usual poll was at least 2000. Mifflin, who at the beginning of the year seemed in trouble, won handily in the distracted city and state. (This despite rumblings that Mifflin had helped cause the epidemic. "Do I not know that the governor of our state is a man who has not god in all his thoughts," Julia wrote to her husband after hearing a rousing sermon in Princeton.)
Rush's first patient on Tuesday morning was Timothy Pickering's son. In early October Pickering had written to a friend in Massachusetts that he had "such confidence in the safety of Dr. Rush's practice that my fear of the disease is greatly abated." He and his family were careful to follow Rush's strictures. "We eat largely of bread and vegetables, little or no butter, but molasses and honey instead thereof, barley soup, and very little meat. We drink no wine but use porter much diluted with water, tea, coffee and chocolate. And we are careful to keep the body gently open. Castor oil we find most convenient for this purpose, taken about once a week." Most people died, he thought, from want of care. "Many have been abandoned by their friends, and left in the hands of negroes and other ignorant mercenaries."
A few days later a maid and his six year old son Edward got the fever. The maid recovered while groaning "loudly" about the purging and puking. After getting the same medicine, his son didn't recover, and "... he refused to take anything and in answer to his mother's importuning said his throat was stopped," Pickering wrote to Rush and asked if glysters were in order. That night mother and father administered three and at sunrise the boy passed a stool. The fourth glyster "was followed by several small evacuations," which seemed to relieve him. Then the boy puked dark matter. Before he had only puked while being bled. Pickering thought the "critical moment" had arrived and begged Rush to hasten his visit. Pickering and Rush did not record the last measures they tried before the boy died. Unlike a grocer who wrote to Rush blaming his daughter's death on "the drastic operation of the mercurial purges," Pickering did not blame Rush.
Unlike other times his return to the fray did not seem to invigorate Rush. When he wrote that evening he mainly reported depressing news. Two more allies, Drs. Parke and Physick, were sick. A story that an old enemy had called for him as he lay dying proved false. The old enemy had expressly instructed that if he got sick only a French doctor should be called. He died that morning. Samuel Meredith was sick again and Rush sent Fisher out to see him. Dr. Redman's daughter was "in danger." Her father at least was well and "full of praises to God and love to the whole human race." In closing his evening letter to Julia he added that she could not use any of the dresses in the house because the whole place was so infected. "Nearly an hundred people discharge their infected breath in it every day, for many people in the first stage of the disorder are able to walk about and to call upon a physician." Before he retired he read the 102nd Psalm:
I am like a pelican of the wilderness; I am like an owl of the desert. I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top. Mine enemies reproach me all the day; and they that are mad against me are sworn against me....which made him weep.
In the morning many asked for him. Dr. Mease, himself "most violently attacked again," urged Rush to see his neighbor Daniel Offley, who had been recovering but "presumed too much on it and it threw him back again." Rush was too weak to go, writing to his wife that he declined all calls that day.
In his memoir his recollection of that day, October 9, was different. He recalled visiting many patients "and, as the day was warm, I lessened the quantity of my clothing. Towards evening I was seized with a pain in the back, which obliged me to go to bed at eight o'clock." His most vivid recollection of what happened after that is a November 8 letter he wrote to Julia: "At one o'clock, I was attacked in a most violent manner with all the symptoms of the fever. Seldom have I endured more pain. My mind sympathized with my body. You and my seven dear children rushed upon my imagination and tore my heartstrings in a manner I had not experienced in my former illness. A recovery in my weak and exhausted state seemed hardly probable. At 2 o'clock I called up Marcus and Mr. Fisher, who slept in the adjoining room. Mr. Fisher bled me, which instantly removed my pains, and then gave me a dose and an half of the mercurial medicine. It puked me several times during the night and brought off a good deal of bile from my stomach. The next morning it operated downwards and relieved me so much that I was able to sit up long enough to finish my letter to you."
He began that letter, "after a comfortable night's rest I rose this morning at 7 o'clock and have ever since been in the midst of sickness and distress." He decided not to describe how serious his attack had been so that she would not feel compelled to come into the city to nurse him. However, he didn't go so far as to claim he visited patients. He only mentioned that there just seemed always to be "eight of ten people" in his house.
That afternoon his fever returned sharply, and he felt very tired, which he thought an alarming symptom. Fisher bled him which revived him. His letter to Julia that night was depressed, noting the great mortality among the poor, especially servants. Another Catholic priest who had been his patient died, "and I fear suffered from my being obliged to desert him." Redman's daughter and Dr. Griffitts were better. It was the shortest letter he had written in the relative quiet of the evening.
The next morning he mentioned the return of his fever to Julia. And could manage only to write a few lines, perhaps of self diagnosis: "It belongs to the disease to end in an intermittent in many people,... and what is unfortunate, it will not bear the bark." He no longer saw patients, and even avoided rooms where patients had been. He decided to avoid contagion at all costs. Then on the night of the 11th, as he explained in his November 8 letter, "I fell into just such a fainty fit as I had about the crisis of my pleurisy in the year 1788. I called upon Marcus, who slept in the room with me, for something to drink and afterwards for some nourishment, which revived me in a few minutes, so that I slept well the remaining part of the night. One or two nights afterwards he gave me something to eat, which prevented a return of the fainty fits."
It would be difficult to exaggerate the miserable condition of the city. A letter said to have been written by Rush on the 10th was widely paraphrased in newspapers around the country: "the disorder was now past the art of man or medicine to cure, that nothing but the power of the Almighty could stop it." No one disputed that assessment. Mrs. William Smith had every reason to see a ray of hope. She had just nursed her daughter Rebecca Blodget to health.Yet she wrote to a friend, "it is not possible for me to pass the streets without walking in a line with the dead, passing infected houses, and looking into open graves.... I don't know what to write; my head is gone, and my heart is torn to pieces."
From Lansdowne, a stately mansion outside the city, the British diplomat George Hammond reported to London that there was no appearance of the epidemic's "ravages being checked.... It is certainly one of the most malignant that has ever visited in any age or nation." The city's Episcopal churches finally closed due to illnesses of clerks and sextons.
The fever even invaded the house where Girard forgot the horrors of Bush Hill and lived as if nothing were amiss. After dinner on the 9th Seguin, the young clerk visiting Girard, suddenly felt "bad with the collick and the head ache." He feared he was getting "the plague," and wrote that "it hurted me very much, for I thought if I should be sick they would send me to Bush, to the ospickle." Seguin managed to pull himself together and after helping close Girard's store at 7 p.m., amused himself "with a young Creole,... about 17 years of age and she told of all the accidents that arrive her in her voyage, and she told me she was boarded by 2 privateers, and that they searched them every where...." The next day he had the fever badly. Girard did not send him to the hospital but decided to try a water cure and treat him with a "grand lavage."
Seeing no end in sight some finally fled the city. Others finally left because all their reasons for staying were dead. John Todd's father died, then his mother succumbed and died on October 12. John let his brother take him to the country, to Dolley and his boys. To preserve them John set up his own quarantine, taking a separate room and spending most of the time outdoors away from everyone.
Yet a few came into the city. John Welsh took his fever while on an errand outside the city. He stayed there to recover and when well enough on the 12th came back to get to work. He found the city a "mournful place." The banks were still open so he was able to make deposits to cover his firm's notes. He made visits and was gratified to find the mayor's wife "in a very fair way of recovering." The city was "equally (if not worse) as bad as when I left it, and a great deal more gloomy - little doing, and a few people in the streets." His chief worry was that John Swanwick would die before making good on a $3,000 debt to the firm. There was a pervasive worry in business circles that with so many dying so quickly without a chance to arrange for paying debts that "great derangements will take place and many great losses must be sustained."
The federal customs house had moved to Chester. After payments were made on federal government securities in early October, treasury department register Joseph Nourse left. His head clerk Joseph Dawson became the highest federal official still on the job. He had stayed because his wife had just had a baby and was not yet strong enough to travel. On the 10th he prepared to leave, then his sister-in-law died. While breaking the news to his wife and her mother, he broke down and was unable to leave the city or go to the office. A few clerks remained. Then Thomas O'Hara died, five days after "taking the scent" when he stumbled into a coffin that fell from a cart onto the street. With his death no one wanted to enter the treasury offices.
Only when the post office, which had moved to 4th and Arch Streets, opened daily at 3p.m. were there signs of life. A crowd always gathered for letters. As for the common people, there was no work for those who remained, prompting one correspondent in the Gazette to urge that supplies being sent from the country be used to pay laborers to continue their usual work. Idleness would increase their propensity to get the fever; work would keep their bodies "in a due state of perspiration." However the Committee was in no state to undertake such social engineering. An October 11 letter in a New York newspaper noted that many members were "indisposed, so that the remainder with their multiplied engagements, have indeed a laborious time of it." On the 11th only eight men joined Mayor Clarkson at City Hall. In the past week the number of orphans to care for had doubled to 70. Daniel Offley who had volunteered expressly to supervise their care died that day.
In a October 12 letter to his father, Benjamin Smith contrasted the recovery of his children and wife ("tho weakened in consequence of the treatment she has undergone") and his own good health with the death of "such a man as D. Offley,... how mysterious and unsearchable are the ways of Providence." Throughout the epidemic Smith thought he charted a rational course. Deaths were few in his immediate neighborhood; he stayed mostly in his house; he did receive visitors who had been among the sick, but when he paid visits to the sick he was careful to go only when they were well on their way to recovery. After closing his letter to his father, Smith felt sharp pains in his head and went to bed with a fever. Debby summoned her mother, who thought he looked much like her son John had at first. She sent for Rush, but he was confined and his apprentices all out. Dr. Mease was "too ill to bespoken to." Benjamin mentioned Parke, but he was ill, and then Dr. James, but he was too weak to practice. James recommended Cathrall, who decided that Smith could not have yellow fever because his eyes were not red. Margaret knew he had it and told Cathrall that she would consult Dr. Rush. On the way to Walnut Street she met one of Rush's apprentices who promptly bled and purged Smith.
It rained Saturday night and there was a "strong northwest wind during the whole night." Henry Helmuth wrote, "Perhaps God wants to help this poor city and bring back its health by this wind." The previous week 130 members of his congregation had been buried. Rush did not notice the change in weather. The city had lost his services. "My fellow citizens, I hope will excuse me," he wrote to Julia on the morning of the 12th, "especially when they recollect how often my premature exertions have brought back my fever." On the 13th he wrote to her that he hoped his conduct "will not be offensive to my divine Master..., to go further than I have done would be I fear to 'tempt the Lord' to preserve me out of the ordinary means of his holy and wise providence." The bedridden doctor did no more than react to the mail and think about his family. "I have thought more of you and the dear children within these two days," he wrote to Julia, "than I have done for six weeks." He asked her how many teeth their baby Mary had.
go to chapter 11
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