Yellow Fever Exhibit Resources: Home

1793 was not the only year Yellow Fever ravaged Philadelphia. From UPenn History and Sociology of Science faculty member David Barnes, discover the controversial history of the country's first quarantine house and its impact on the future of immigration and trade in America.

Explore the ways Yellow Fever wrecked havoc in colonial America and the rest of the world.

Learn how after centuries of outbreaks, a team of researchers in 1900 put their own lives on the line in order to finally uncover the true source of Yellow Fever.

Law and Medicine in Revolutionary America: Dissecting the Rush v. Cobbett Trial, 1799 offers the first deep analysis of the most important libel trial in post-revolutionary America and an approach to understanding a much-studied revolutionary figure, Benjamin Rush, in a new light as a legal subject. This libel trial faced off the new nation's most prestigious physician-patriot, Benjamin Rush, against its most popular journalist, William Cobbett, the editor of Porcupine's Gazette. Studied by means of a rare and substantial surviving transcript, the trial features six litigating counsel whose narrative of events and roles provides a unique view of how the revolutionary generation saw itself and the legacy it wished to leave to its progeny. The trial is structured by assaults against medical bleeding and its premier practitioner in yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s in Philadelphia, on the one hand, and castigates the licentiousness of the press in the nation's then-capital city, on the other. As it does so, it exemplifies the much-derided litigiousness of the new nation and the threat of sedition that characterized the development of political parties and the partisan press in late eighteenth-century America.

Yellow Fever is certainly not the only epidemic causing disease. In this chronological work, place Philadelphia's 1793 fever in context with other history-defining outbreaks and see how past pandemics influenced contemporary understandings of disease.

How does the media influence how we understand a public health emergency? Using Philadelphia's 1793 Yellow Fever outbreak as a foundational example, Foss discusses how news reporting on epidemics communicates more than just information about pathogens; rather, prejudices, political agendas, religious beliefs, and theories of disease also shape the message.

This critically-acclaimed work of middle grade historical fiction follows 16-year-old Matilda Cook, whose life in early America is thrown into chaos when a disease begins to rip its way through Philadelphia.

In what may be the first fictional depiction of the 1793 Philadelphia outbreak, Brown draws on his own experience of living through the Yellow Fever epidemic to create the setting of this gothic novel.

Written by UPenn professor Stephen Fried, this expansive biography of Dr. Rush investigates his legacy in American medicine, politics, and more.

While Dr. Rush gained plenty of acclaim for his work fighting Yellow Fever, it also brought him plenty of detractors. Most notably, Rush drew the ire of William Cobbett, the editor of the popular Porcupine's Gazette, who would regularly criticize Rush's use of bleeding as treatment in the press. This book explores the lengthy libel trial that followed, examining its implications on law, medicine, and politics in early America.