Yellow fever struck Philadelphia in August 1793. At the time, the vibrant port city was home to 50,000 Americans. By November, 10 percent of them would be dead. A virus endemic to tropical regions, yellow fever traveled to Philadelphia in the bloodstreams of refugees from the Haitian Revolution. From there, mosquitoes teeming in the summer heat transmitted it from person to person as doctors struggled to contain a disease that, at its peak, killed 100 people a day.
The death toll and devastation reminded Benjamin Rush 1760 of the Black Plague. “It comes nearer to it than any disease we have ever before had in this country,” he wrote during the first weeks of the epidemic. A signer of the Declaration of Independence and the nation’s pre-eminent physician, Rush diagnosed the city’s first case of yellow fever in August. As Philadelphians fled the city in droves, he chose to remain and treat the sick — though neither common fever remedies (wine and sweating) nor Rush’s own prescriptions (bleeding and purging) had any effect. Some patients died in a matter of hours. Few survived more than four days.
“Tell the whole village of Princeton to pray constantly and fervently for us,” Rush wrote his wife, Julia, a member of Princeton’s distinguished Stockton family. Only God could save them, “for vain — vain now is the help of man.”
Yet Rush did have help in Philadelphia. Across the city, African Americans (whom white Americans wrongly believed to be immune to the disease) served as nurses, caretakers, and gravediggers in large numbers. They were “indefatigable,” Rush said — and none more than his own assistant, Marcus Marsh.
“Marcus [Marsh] has not, like Briarius, a hundred hands, but he can turn his two hands to a hundred different things.”
Marsh was born into slavery in 1765, on the Morven estate in Princeton. After his mother’s death, the lady of the house, Annis Boudinot Stockton, nursed the infant Marsh, raising him “almost as my own son.” The “almost” was key; Marsh had no rights until the Stocktons freed him in 1781. By 1793, he was working for Annis’ son-in-law Rush as a servant and, in Philadelphia, as a medical assistant.
In a letter to Julia, Rush compared Marsh to a Greek god with 100 arms: “Marcus has not, like Briarius, a hundred hands, but he can turn his two hands to a hundred different things.” He was “equal to any apothecary in town,” more competent even than some physicians Rush knew. His courage was most remarkable of all.
“Half the servants in the city have deserted their masters” to escape the disease, Rush wrote in October. Marsh, however, stayed to fight the epidemic alongside Rush. When the doctor himself contracted yellow fever, Marsh brought him food, water, and medicine in the night; he fed the weakened Rush; and he visited Rush’s children outside the city to examine them.
“I cannot tell you how much we all owe to Marcus,” Rush wrote to his wife when the epidemic finally subsided in November. Without him, the nation’s most famous physician might too have numbered among the dead.
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2 Responses
Ken Klein
6 Days AgoThanks for this Letter
Thank you. Edifying.
Kevin R. Loughlin ’71
1 Week Ago‘He Has Done More Good in the World than Franklin or Washington’
Among our Founding Fathers there was no shortage of genius, starting with the talents exhibited by Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Washington. However, it can be reasonably argued that the brilliant light of one Founding Father has been inexplicably and unfairly overshadowed by his contemporaries.
Benjamin Rush, Princeton Class of 1760, was a polymath. He was the only physician signer of the Declaration of Independence, an early abolitionist and women’s advocate, and a confidant and adviser to Thomas Paine. Although his actions during the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793 have not withstood the scrutiny of modern medicine, he nonetheless trained many of the notable North American physicians of the next generation.
Rush was an avid patriot and in response to Parliament’s passage of the Tea Act, he wrote a letter, under a pseudonym, in 1773, that culminated in the Boston Tea Party later that year. He was an active participant at the Continental Congress. When Paine brought him a copy of a manuscript which he had titled, “Plain Truth,” Rush suggested that he change the title to “Common Sense” and helped him find a publisher.
As a physician, he is credited with being one of the founders of American psychiatry and in 1812 published his treatise, “Medical Inquiries and Observation Upon the Diseases of the Mind.” He was one of the physician leaders in the response to the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia and contracted the disease himself. Nonetheless, he erroneously thought the disease was caused by a “noxious miasma” and was also a proponent of bloodletting to treat a variety of maladies.
Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was serving as the conciliator of the relationship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Although Adams and Jefferson had worked together closely during the formation of the Republic, the acrimonious election of 1800 placed a wedge between the former friends. Adams wanted, and thought he deserved, a second term as president. Jefferson ran against him. The Federalists painted Jefferson as a radical and Francophile, whereas the Democratic-Republicans portrayed Adams as someone who aspired to monarchial power.
After Jefferson emerged victorious, both the nation and the personal relationship were fractured. Evidence for the depth of the national acrimony was evidenced in Jefferson’s inaugural address when he said, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”
It was only through the intervention of Rush that the disrupted friendship began to be repaired. In an 1809 letter to Adams, Rush recounted a dream where he envisioned the reconciliation between Adams and Jefferson. This began a series of letters from Rush to both Adams and Jefferson initiating the rapprochement between the two men which was completed before their simultaneous deaths on July 4, 1826.
It is fitting that prior to their deaths, but after the death of Rush, Adams wrote in a letter to Jefferson, “No man would apologize for me if I could say that in the estimation of unprejudiced philosophy, he has done more good in the world than Franklin or Washington.”