Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793 - Softcover

Powell, J. H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1614279853 ISBN 13: 9781614279853

Publisher: Martino Fine Books, 2016

Synopsis

2016 Reprint of 1949 Edition. Two parts in one volume. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. The first major American yellow fever epidemic hit Philadelphia in July 1793 and peaked during the first weeks of October. Philadelphia, then the nation's capital, was the most cosmopolitan city in the United States. Two thousand free blacks lived there, as well as many recent white French-speaking arrivals from the colony of Santo Domingo, who were fleeing from a slave rebellion. Major Revolutionary political figures lived there, and in the first week of September, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison that everyone who could escape the city was doing so. The epidemic depopulated Philadelphia: 5,000 out of a population of 45,000 died, and chronicler Mathew Carey estimated that another 17,000 fled. In this psychological portrait of a city in terror, J. H. Powell presents a penetrating study of human nature revealing itself. "Bring Out Your Dead" is an absorbing account, form the original sources, of an infamous tragedy that left its mark on all it touched.

About this title

About the Author:

John Harvey Powell (1914-1971) graduated from Swarthmore College and earned his Ph.D. degree in American History at the University of Iowa. Kenneth R. Foster is Associate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Mary F. Jenkins is a Supervisory Park Ranger and Supervisor of the Dolley Todd Madison House and Visitor Center at Independence National Historical Park. Anna Coxe Toogood is Park Historian at Independence National Historical Park.

Review:

"Unique in its weaving of the timeless aspects of human behavior with an authentic account of a major epidemic in American and medical history, this book is carefully researched and a very good read."—Nursing History Review

"A brilliant case study of the visitation of the scourge in Penn's city."—American Historical Review

"A 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."—Time

"A brilliant and model treatment of one of the most macabre incidents in American History."—New York Herald Tribune

About this edition

• Publisher: Martino Fine Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1614279853
• ISBN 13: 9781614279853
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 330