Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793 (review)

Book Reviews49 (and such events are always coming around), the Gwynedd record can be recommended as a model. The historical sketch is written with good balance, including both general features of Quakerism over 250 years and local data. A short history of the Friends School follows. The bibliography includes both manuscript minutes and printed items. There is a list of present meeting members, and the program and list of committees for the 250th anniversary celebration, held on October 15, 1949. Presumably it is to the Committee on Research and Publication that we are indebted for this creditable anonymous publication. The substantial and attractively printed pamphlet on Abington Meeting was written and published by Horace M. Lippincott to celebrate the 250th anniversary of a meeting which had enjoyed similar celebrations in 1899, 1929, 1933 and 1947. It is filled with the available historical details and with characteristic reflections, quotations, anecdotes, and reminiscences, the last being of particular value. The meeting began in 1683 at the house of Richard Wall. In recent years its membership has grown very large. The school dates back to a bequest of John Barnes in 1697. It is the meetinghouse that dates back to 1699. The writer casts his net rather wider than strictly local history. The sister monthly meeting of the "Orthodox" branch, though of the same name and ancestry, is not dealt with. Harvard UniversityHenry J. Cadbury Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793. By J. H. Powell. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1949. xvi, 304 pages. $3.75. Now, alas, the joyful city is become almost desolate; and she that was great in traffic is much forsaken! .... Many still continue to be removed by death; and none know whose turn will be next. This great plain dealer visits alike the humble cottage and the splendid dome, and executes his commission according to the divine will. HP HESE WERE the reflections of a pious Quaker in the midst of the frightful epidemic of yellow fever that afflicted Philadelphia in 1793. John Powell in his brilliant and gruesome book does not cite Joshua Cresson's solemn Meditations, though he is undoubtedly familiar with them along with the multiplicity of other source materials upon which he has levied to recreate Philadelphia's plague year in nightmarish clarity and horror. It is all here—the appalling shrieks and groans, the revolting and pathetic sights, the intolerable smells, the cowardice, the hysteria, the tragedy, and the heroism of that memorable year in which more than five thousand Philadelphians were swept away in the space of a few months. 50Bulletin of Friends Historical Association Among the heroes of John Powell's macabre piece are a number of Friends who remained in the shuddering city doing their best to relieve suffering (there were other Friends, it should be noted, who promptly fled to more salubrious spots in the country) . Caleb Lownes, Thomas Wistar, and Thomas Harrison signed personal notes for the loan which enabled harassed Mayor Mathew Clarkson to marshall his forces against the dread visitant and they did yeoman service on the ad hoc committee which acted as a kind of volunteer general staff when the regular city government disintegrated. Three younger Friends— James Wilson, Jacob Tomkins, and William Sansom, Guardians of the Poor—worked indefatigably to supply the needs of the indigent. Fatalities among Friends exceeded four hundred; Joshua Cresson whose somber but impressive Meditations recorded the Quaker reaction to the pestilence, was one of the victims. The doctors, working in the dark in those days before Walter Reed, naturally play a central role in the story, as they plod wearily about the streets, visiting their patients, exposing themselves constantly to infection, and differing violently over the proper treatment of the mysterious fever. Quaker doctors like Caspar Wistar and Samuel Powel Griffitts bore their part alike in the sacrificial labor and in the heated controversies. John Powell's two medical heroes, however, are Dr. Jean Devèze, the brilliant French refugee from the West Indies, who was amazingly right about the management of yellow fever cases and, more especially, Dr. Benjamin Rush, who was "tragically, frightfully" (Powell's own words) wrong about...