Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1259738
✖✚✖✚ A Cry for Help AS THE DISEASE SPREAD, so too did panic. Some 20,000 residents fled the city. Deaths became so frequent that the College of Physicians asked city officials to stop tolling bells for the dead because the constant ringing was so oppressive. At the time, no one knew what caused the outbreak. (It was not until the 1880s that the Aedes aegypti mosquito was identified as the principal trans- mission vector of yellow fever.) Many Philadelphians believed the outbreak was somehow linked to "bad vapors" from cof- fee left rotting on the docks. Most people knew the disease was contagious, although many wrongly believed Black people were immune. With the exodus of so many able-bodied residents, care for the sick and dying was limited at best. In desperation, civic lead- ers — including Declaration of Independence signatory Benjamin Rush, M.D., then a professor at the Institutes of Medicine — approached the city's Black community for help. The leaders of Philadelphia's Free African Society, a mutual aid organization founded in 1787 by ministers Absalom Jones and Richard Allen in part- nership with Black abolitionists like William Gray, willingly agreed to provide that assistance. FEW OF THE BLACK Philadelphians who answered the call had any medical train- ing. Nursing, Jones and Allen later remarked, "is in itself a considerable art, derived from experience as well as the exer- cise of the finer feelings of humanity — this experience, nine-tenths of those employed, it is probable, were wholly strangers to." Skilled nurses were in very short supply in Philadelphia, and some had already balked at the horrendous conditions at the makeshift hospital estab- lished in Andrew Hamilton's Bush Hill mansion. (Jones and Allen noted that Bush Hill's two Black nurses were among the few who stayed.) As the epidem- ic worsened, greater responsibil- ity fell on the Black volunteers. After several physicians died of the disease, Rush even recruited Jones and Allen, who had some medical experience, to act as nurses. "[He] directed us where to procure medicine duly prepared, with proper directions how to administer them, and at what stages of the disorder to bleed [the patients]; and when we found ourselves uncapable of judging what was proper to be done, to apply to him," the two ministers later wrote. By their own account, they cared for "upwards of 800 peo- ple," asking little or nothing in return. ✖✚✖✚ No Good Deed Unpunished UNFORTUNATELY, prejudices die hard, and there's nothing like a pandemic to bring them out. That November, a prominent white printer, Mathew Carey, published an inflammatory pamphlet with the cumbersome title A Short Account of the Malignant Fever Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia with a Statement of the Proceedings That Took Place on the Subject Ministers Absalom Jones and Richard Allen (left and center) and pamphleteer Mathew Carey (right) June 15–July 27, 2020 Working Nurse l WorkingNurse.com 13