Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1259738
in the Different Parts of the United States. THE PAMPHLET LAMBASTED the city's response to the epi- demic. Carey directed much of his vitriol at the Black com- munity. "The great demand for nurses … was eagerly seized by some of the vilest of the blacks," he claimed. "They extorted two, three, four and even five dollars a night for such attendance, as would have been well paid by a single dollar. Some of them were even detected in plunder- ing the houses of the sick." ✖✚✖✚ Striking Back HIS CHARGES DID NOT go unanswered. Although he had not attacked them personal- ly, Jones and Allen took excep- tion to Carey's vilification of their community. The two Black ministers fired back in January 1794 with their own expansively titled publication, A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia in the Year of 1793: and a Refutation of Some Censures Thrown Upon Them in Some Late Publications. IN THEIR REBUTTAL, the ministers praised the Black nurses for their selfless work. Jones and Allen acknowledged that during the worst of the out- break, desperate patients and families had sometimes offered or been asked for "extravagant prices" for any help. However, the ministers noted that "there were as many white as Black peo- ple detected in pilfering, although the number of the lat- ter employed as nurses was 20 times as great as the former." As for themselves, Jones and Allen explained, "At first we made no charge, but left it to those we served in removing their dead to give us what they thought fit." They added that the money they had received, which totaled some £233, 10 shillings and 4 pence, was well short of their expenses, which included hundreds of coffins for the dead and more than nine weeks' wages for the five men they had hired to help them. The ministers took no wages for their own labor and pub- lished a complete tally of their receipts and expenses. "Had Mr. Carey been solicit- ed to such an undertaking, for hire," Jones and Allen wrote, "What would he have demand- ed?" ✖✚✖✚ Scenes of Horror JONES AND ALLEN presented a vivid picture of the nurses' experience during the outbreak. Yellow fever causes delirium, which left some patients "raging and frightful to behold." Others were "vomiting blood and screaming enough to chill [bystanders] with horror." The scene at the Bush Hill hospital was, in Carey's own words, "as wretched a picture of human misery as ever existed. … The dying and the dead Yellow fever causes delirium, which left some patients "raging and frightful to behold." Others screamed and vomited blood. The Philadelphia yellow fever outbreak of 1793. Andrew Hamilton's Bush Hill mansion became a makeshift hospital. 14 Working Nurse l WorkingNurse.com June 15–July 27, 2020