How Did Yellow Fever Affect Philadelphia In 1793

Doctors in 1793. Did you know that Yellow Fever is one of the most deadly diseases in the world? Yellow Fever overtook Philadelphia in 1793, and people were trying to flee Philadelphia, and if they couldn’t, were quarantined or were barricaded in their houses, to hide from the disease. The purpose of this essay is to compare and contrast two doctors' agreements and disagreements regarding their treatment of yellow fever. If I was in Philadelphia in 1793, I would choose Dr. Rush’s bloodletting treatment. Yellow Fever is a disease from Philadelphia 1793, which in most cases, kills people with a very slow and painful death, getting the name from when the eyeballs and skin color turn yellow. It impacted the people in Philadelphia because of all the death to the people it had

I know this because an article says,”The disease gets its name from the jaundiced eyes and skin of the victims. Other symptoms include fever, headache, and "black vomit" caused by bleeding into the stomach.” (History Resources). This impacts Philadelphia because of how many deaths, pain and also the sickness being sort of unknown which made the illness very confusing, and very dangerous to everyone because at first they had no cure. Dr. Currie, a pretty well known doctor that was in Philadelphia in 1793, had thought that the cause of the disease was a foul smell that was coming from the docs, and thought that the disease was not Yellow Fever. I know this because a text says, “In addition, he felt strongly that whatever fever they might be facing has been imported from another area- probably from the West Indies by the recently arrived Santo Domingos- and that it was spread by close contact with an infected person.” (Jim Murphy, 26). This shows the readers that Dr. Currie had believed that the illness was coming from a foul smell coming from the docs, or where the West Indies was.