PREV ARTICLE       NEXT ARTICLE       FULL ISSUE       PREV FULL ISSUE      

V4 2001 INDEX       E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 4, Number 46, November 11, 2001, Article 12 CACHE OF EPIDEMIC LETTERS UNCOVERED Sound eerily familiar? "The nation's capital was struck by a plague so terrible that 10 percent of the population died in a matter of months. People panicked. Everyone who could fled the city. Politicians seized the moment to try to gain advantages over their opponents. An instant book appeared and became an international best seller, snapped up by some who wanted to read the gruesome details of the disease and its accompanying social disruption, and by others who wanted to pore over its list of the dead. The city was Philadelphia in 1793, and the disease was yellow fever. No one knew where the illness came from or how it was spreading. No one knew the best treatment or how to clean up the city. It was a hemorrhagic fever, Ebola-like in many symptoms. And it was, in a way, a natural form of bioterrorism. Now, researchers at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia have found a cache of letters and documents from that terrible time, written by historic figures like Alexander Hamilton and Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a professor at what is now the University of Pennsylvania. While the letters do not change the general picture of the epidemic, they offer new details and give the events immediacy." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/06/health/06YELL.html U.S. numismatists, particularly early copper mavens, have long sought copies of "Bring Out Your Dead : The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793" by J. H. Powell. The book details the calamity which forced the closing of the U.S. Mint. The mystery of the disease was solved by Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), who later became Treasurer of the Mint. Rush detailed his findings in "An Account of the Bilious Remitting Yellow Fever As It Appeared in the City of Philadelphia", published in 1794. The book was republished by Reprint Services Corp (Jan 1, 1999, ISBN: 0781288525) For more i nformation, see "Revolutionary Doctor" by Carl Binger, 1966, and these web pages: http://hsc.virginia.edu/hs-library/historical/classics/Rush.html http://members.aol.com/Fever1793/account93.html

Wayne Homren, Editor

	coinbooks.org Web

The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization 
promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org.

To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor 
at this address: whomren@coinlibrary.com

To subscribe go to: https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/esylum