The 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic, United States, 5.000 Casualties
Yellow Fever is a disease that resulted in a large epidemic in Europe and North America in the 1600s. The disease is spread by mosquitoes and symptoms include high fever, jaundice, diarrhea and internal bleeding, which in severe cases can lead to death.
The fever is most infamous for being transferred between ships that travelled across the Atlantic Ocean during the slave trade. This lead to several severe epidemics in the 1700s and 1800s, with one of the most famous occurring in Philadelphia in 1793. At the time, Philadelphia was the temporary capitol of the United States, and the epidemic ended up taking the life of 5.000, or 10 percent, of the city’s population of 50.000 people in the space of just a couple of months, making it one of the deadliest epidemics in US history.
The epidemic began in the Spring of 1793 when French colonial refugees, some with slaves, arrived with 2.000 immigrants from Cap Français, Saint-Domingue. They crowded the port of Philadelphia, and it’s likely that the refugees carried the yellow fever virus and it was transmitted through mosquitoes. When the disease first broke out, doctors and other survivors of the epidemic wrote extensively about it trying to learn from the crisis, not realizing that mosquitoes were the cause of the epidemic.