Purge and Bleed: Philadelphia's Yellow Fever Epidemic and the Stagnation of American Medicine

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Marshall Foletta

Purge and Bleed

Philadelphia's Yellow Fever Epidemic and the Stagnation of American Medicine

Marshall Foletta

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English

University of Virginia Press
01 July 2025

History of the Americas; Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900; History of medicine; Coping with illness

Explaining the deadly stasis of American medicine in the nineteenth century

The 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia was a shock to the system of American medicine - or it should have been. In the decades that followed the most infamous health crisis of the early republic, American doctors by and large failed to move beyond ancient ideas of disease and treatment. The contentiousness of Philadelphia's medical community, led by Benjamin Rush, prevented any meaningful advances in response to the outbreak.

Marshall Foletta investigates this peculiar dormancy over the course of the long nineteenth century and reveals how little had changed by the time of the 1832 cholera epidemic - leading, he argues, to exhaustion and despair among medical professionals and fatalism among the general public. Only at the end of the century did researchers make the all-important breakthroughs that produced an antidote to yellow fever. This is the story of how received wisdom became dangerously entrenched in the early United States, and the deadly consequences of scientific stagnation and intellectual inertia.

By: Marshall Foletta
Imprint: University of Virginia Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 25mm
ISBN: 9780813953120
ISBN 10: 081395312X
Pages: 282
Publication Date: 01 July 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Marshall Foletta is an independent scholar. He completed his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and is the author of Coming to Terms with Democracy: Federalist Intellectuals and the Shaping of an American Culture, 1800 - 1828 (Virginia).