New York’s Disconcerting Summer

By Victoria Johnson

We have been here before. Political protestors marching in the streets while an invisible disease spreads through the city. Worried officials meeting behind closed doors, followed by efforts to reassure the public. Business coming to a halt. Fear of contagion traveling across state lines. Wealthy New Yorkers fleeing to their country houses. Controversies about effective treatments. The intense politicization of public health.

In the summer of 1795, New Yorkers were protesting in the streets over the ratification of the controversial treaty John Jay had signed with Great Britain the previous fall.[1] Suddenly, the city’s soaring political fevers collided with the real thing. Around July 19, the British ship Zephyr arrived at New York from Port-au-Prince and unloaded most of its cargo at the foot of William Street before sailing out into the East River to dump 22 barrels of spoiled coffee. A few weeks later, a brief, painful notice appeared in a New England newspaper: “The Yellow Fever prevails in New York.”[2] The son of a prominent New York politician had been stricken: “Mr. Amiel Jenkins… is in the last stage of the Yellow Fever — His tongue lies clot[t]ed in blood, and his physicians consequently despair of his recovery.”[3] In an age when the role of microbes in disease was unknown, many people thought that rotten cargo itself was the source of the illness. It is, in fact, the Aedes aegypti mosquito that carries the yellow-fever virus.

New York had largely been spared the devastation visited on Philadelphia during the terrible yellow-fever epidemics of 1793 and 1794. By the end of the 1793 epidemic in Philadelphia, more than 4,000 putrefying bodies had been trundled to gravesites and potters’ fields, past the deserted townhouses of those who had escaped to the countryside or were already dead. Not everyone who contracted yellow fever died, but the course of the illness in those who did took one terrifying turn after another. First came chills, intense back pain, and yellowing skin; then came a black crust on the tongue, delirium, and a diarrhea that resembled mola`sses. In the last hours of life, victims often lay with their knees drawn up toward their chins, as if to shield themselves from an attacker. Expiring bodies purged their contents so violently that the dying seemed to be retching up chunks of their own stomachs in vomit that had the look and feel of coffee grounds.

David Hosack, by John Trumbull, circa 1810. Permission of the Linnean Society of London.

A young doctor named David Hosack had a front-row seat on the difficult summer of 1795 in New York. Born in New York in 1769, he had studied in Philadelphia with Dr. Benjamin Rush, the most prominent physician in the nation, before going to Edinburgh and London for advanced medical studies. When Hosack returned to New York in 1794, he was appointed a professor of medicine and botany at Columbia, his alma mater. He tended to patients in his private clinic, at the prison, at the almshouse, and the New York Hospital.

Hosack’s mentor Rush insisted that in the treatment of yellow fever, bloodletting, along with liberal doses of mercury, was of paramount importance. The loss of blood, he claimed, reduced inflammation, lowered the heart rate, and alleviated pain. In a report he published a few years later, he noted that every patient he had saved in 1793 had been bled, and he therefore resolved to use the lancet even more vigorously during the yellow-fever epidemic that hit Philadelphia in 1794. He sliced through the tender skin of a girl named Sally Eyre nine times, spilling 80 ounces of her blood into a waiting bowl. He relieved a man named John Madge of almost double that amount in 12 sessions. For all the horror he witnessed, Rush found a sinister beauty in the treatments. The blood of some patients left “a beautiful scarlet coloured sediment in the bottom of the bowl.”[4]

Now, in New York in the summer of 1795, as signs of illness began to make their appearance at the houses closest to the East River wharves, his former student Hosack held out hope that the disease was not, in fact, yellow fever. Like many other people, he thought — erroneously — that yellow fever was contagious. If the tendrils of rumor were permitted to reach out across the green fields of Long Island and New Jersey, up toward Boston and down toward Philadelphia, the city would face economic disaster. Ships’ captains would sail their vessels toward healthier ports, unloading their cargo on the wharves of other cities. Farmers would stop loading their produce and livestock onto ferries bound for the markets of lower Manhattan. Men of all classes, along with their families — merchants, artisans, and day laborers alike — would be ruined. Malnutrition would strengthen the destructive force of the epidemic.

On a Saturday evening in mid-August, New York City’s physicians converged on City Hall for an emergency meeting. At their head was Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill, a Columbia professor who had set aside his pioneering research on the anesthetic effects of nitrous oxide (later known as laughing gas) to help stem the rising tide of anxiety in the city. The physicians issued a terse statement to the press: “It was agreed to, as the opinion of this meeting, that no case of yellow fever exists within the circle of practice of any person, now present; and that the same be declared to their fellow citizens, with a view to calm their apprehensions, on the present occasion.”[5] Within a few days, though, Mitchill decamped to his country house on Long Island. The streets were eerily empty, as confusion reigned in New York. Was it yellow fever? Was it contagious?

Although Hosack and his mentor Rush disagreed publicly about the causes and cures of the yellow fever epidemics that hit Philadelphia in 1793 and 1794 and New York in 1795, they remained close friends. In one of his many letters to Hosack, Rush called himself his “friend and brother in the republic of medicine.”[6] On September 3, 1795, Hosack wrote to Rush, “You will no doubt expect a line upon the subject of fever as prevailing here.”[7] The three patients Hosack himself had treated thus far, he told Rush, appeared to have contracted typhus. The approximately 50 cases of fever he had heard about were mainly along the East River, where laborers and sailors lived in the kind of filthy quarters favorable to the spread of disease. Hosack informed Rush that Columbia’s medical professors were treating so many patients in that part of town that “it has actually become proverbial that the faculty is always to be found in Water Street.”[8] Poverty and inequality, then as now, brought extra doses of suffering and death.

As the body count climbed, terrifying rumors whirled through the city. It was said that a dockworker had stuck his arm into a damaged bale of imported cotton, and when he withdrew it, it had turned yellow from the contagion festering inside. Along the Battery, soldiers unleashed cannonades in a vain effort to disperse the sickly air rising from stagnant water around the wharves and in the island’s marshy lowlands. Panicked letters were loaded onto mail stages up and down the coast. The terror seemed to bring out the worst in some people. In early September, a group of neighbors on Water Street attempted to have a 16-year-old girl forcibly deported to the countryside. She had apparently come down with a cold, and she recovered in two days.

The advice coming in from Philadelphia, a city still licking its wounds from the 1793 and 1794 epidemics, was continued vigilance. “Let not the good people of New York and the other towns be too sanguine,” one newspaper recommended. “Rather let them be cautious. It is better to fear too far than to trust too far.”[9] In response, some used sarcasm and political insults to downplay the threat. The Federalist newspaper American Minerva, edited by Noah Webster, mocked the advice from Philadelphia: “The alarm of the Philadelphians at the Yellow Fever resembles the alarm of our Jacobins about the treaty. Raw head and bloody bones, ghosts, goblins, slavery, famine, pestilence, and the Lord knows what evils will befall us, if we have a treaty with Great Britain.”[10] Some New Yorkers simply persisted in maintaining that all was well. An anonymous “Inhabitant of Peck’s Slip” — the East River wharf at the epicenter of the outbreak — swore in a newspaper in early September that “there has been not an individual, except two, in the whole slip, been ailing, and they had trifling colds, and they are now perfectly well.”[11]

View of the Collect Pond and New York City, by Archibald Robertson, 1798. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But over the next weeks, as the dead began to emerge from their houses to be spirited away for burial in churchyards and potters’ fields, many New Yorkers, including Hosack, conceded that yellow fever had seized the city. Eleven people had reportedly died on August 25 alone, and by September 8, John Broome, the chairman of the city health committee, had recorded nearly a hundred deaths.[12] The hired men who carried the bodies away sometimes showed a shocking lack of respect for both the living and the dead; in a letter, the mother of one of Hosack’s students referred to these men as “the hearse monsters.”[13]

The epidemic threw the whole Eastern Seaboard into turmoil. Governor Thomas Mifflin of Pennsylvania issued a proclamation prohibiting all contact between New York City and Philadelphia by land or water, on pain of a $300 fine. When Mayor Richard Varick of New York presented this news to the city council members, they sent word back to Pennsylvania that “a much greater Degree of general Health prevails in this City at present than is usual at this Season of the Year.”[14] Many people agreed with the city council that Governor Mifflin was overreacting. An anonymous letter “To the Citizens of Philadelphia” that ran in an Albany paper near the middle of September ridiculed the hysteria as akin to the Federalists’ needless anxiety about the French Revolution. “Cousins, we are all popping off here like rotten sheep,” the letter went. “Two hundred carcases have been burned on the Battery—500 hanged for fear of catching the Yellow Fever, and about 35 or 40 guillotined—all the windows in town are broken by the firing of cannon—several of our seven story houses have fallen down slam bang of their own accord—Federal hall has got a case of the fidgets, and two yearling pigs have died of the measles—pray send us about 100,000 dollars, to stop the contagion.”[15]

But the bravado masked tragedy. As the death toll mounted during the month of September, New Yorkers traded horror stories. The fear of contagion meant people were dying without their loved ones to comfort them. A doctor named Elihu Hubbard Smith heard a story about an Irishman who was found dead and alone on the floor of his house after his family had abandoned him in his last hours of agony. “This destructive Terror, this malady of the mind,” Smith wrote in his diary, is “a thousand times more dreadful & pernicious than all corporeal evils.”[16] Still, no one knew how the disease was transmitted or how to save those who fell ill. Some doctors, Smith among them, chose to follow Rush’s methods. At the hospital, Hosack saw the blood of the city’s poor running down their arms and dripping off their fingers into bowls. He hesitated to pick up a lancet himself, afraid he would drain his patients of their last energies.

It wasn’t that he was completely opposed to bloodletting. But when a body was already wracked by illness, Hosack’s instincts told him that blood loss would give more power to the fever, not less. Better to keep flesh, bone, and blood safely encased in skin. The trick, he thought, would be to stimulate the circulation and help the patient sweat out the fever. In sickrooms around the city, Hosack began washing limbs and torsos with cold vinegar and water, then wrapping them tightly in blankets. He held cups of pungent liquid to cracked, puffy lips. The burnt bitterness of spiritus mindereri, made from acetic acid and ammonia. Tangy tamarind water from the tamarind tree (Tamarindus indica) of the African tropics. A touch of Virginia snakeroot (Aristolochia serpentaria), poisonous in high doses but a safe and powerful diaphoretic — sweat-inducer — if diluted. Hosack wrote, “When I find my patient sweating within a few hours after the attack of the disease, I congratulate him as secure from danger.”[17]

As that difficult summer of 1795 turned to autumn, the mosquitoes died out and the deaths began tapering off. Shopkeepers opened their doors and the streets once again teemed with carriages and horsecarts. One of Hosack’s students, Alexander Anderson, who was ministering to patients out in the countryside, received a cheerful note from his mother in the city reporting that “some of our acquaintance had just returned to town & by way of thankfullness to their Maker—for theirs & our preservation from the great calamity as they called it—they had got themselves compleatly Drunk.”[18]

There is still no cure for yellow fever today, although there is a vaccine. Hosack’s approach was probably most beneficial for what it did not do — weaken a patient with blood loss just as their internal organs were threatened with collapse. His positive experience with gentle botanical remedies, as compared with bloodletting, inspired him to continue the medical botany research he had begun as a student in Great Britain. He was also inspired to do so by his rescue, in 1797, of Philip Hamilton from a mysterious fever, an act that earned him the profound trust of Alexander and Eliza Hamilton. Hosack soon founded the nation’s first public botanical garden, primarily for medical research, on a piece of farmland he bought in 1801 that is now home to Rockefeller Center. In 1804, he would be chosen by his friends Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton to be the attending physician at their duel. Hosack made it one of his lifelong principles never to let politics interfere with medicine or science. Science, he once wrote, “knows not party politics.”[19]

Victoria Johnson is Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College (CUNY) and the author of American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2018). American Eden was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in Nonfiction, the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography, and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in History.

[1] President George Washington had sent Jay as a special envoy to Great Britain in May 1794 in an effort to defuse rising tensions between the two countries, caused in part by the impressment of American sailors into the Royal Navy. The treaty that Jay signed, and that Congress subsequently approved (minus one article), enraged many Democratic-Republicans, who thought it made humiliating economic concessions to Britain.

[2] Medley, or, Newbedford Marine Journal, 14 August 1795.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations: Containing an Account of the Bilious and Remitting and Intermitting Yellow Fever, as it Appeared in Philadelphia in the Year 1794, vol. 4. (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1796), 84.

[5] Philadelphia Gazette and Universal Daily Advertiser, 20 August 1795.

[6] Benjamin Rush to David Hosack, 7 June 1809, Robbins Mss. B.H.78, American Philosophical Society.

[7] David Hosack to Benjamin Rush, 3 September 1795, Rush Family Papers, Series I: Benjamin Rush Papers, vol. 37, part 3, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Philadelphia Gazette and Universal Daily Advertiser, 28 August 1795.

[10] American Minerva, 5 September 1795. 

[11] Albany Gazette, 11 September 1795.

[12] August 25 deaths: Dr. William Pitt Smith to Dr. Samuel Duffield, 1 September 1795, published in American Minerva, 8 September 1795. Number of deaths by 8 September: John Broome to Governor John Jay, 8 September 1795, published in New York Herald, 30 September 1795.

[13] Sarah Anderson to Alexander Anderson, 10 October 1795, Alexander Anderson Papers, MssCol 98, New York Public Library.

[14] Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1784–1831 (New York: City of New York, 1917), vol. 2, 177.

[15] Albany Register, 11 September 1795.

[16] Diary entry for 25 September 1795, The Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith (1771–1798), ed. James E. Cronin (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1973), 62.

[17] David Hosack, “Observations on the Yellow Fever,” reprinted in New-York Magazine; Or, Literary Repository 2, New Series [no issue number] (September 1797): 453–55, 455.

[18] Sarah Anderson to Alexander Anderson, 19 October 1795, Alexander Anderson Papers, MssCol 98, New York Public Library.

[19] David Hosack to John Vaughan, 16 March 1811, David Hosack Letterbook, 82r, New York Academy of Medicine.