Hello and welcome to the How Epidemics and Project, which is based at the University of Oxford.
My name is Erica Charters and in these videos, I'll be discussing how experts researched disease in a variety of ways,
as well as their investigations into how epidemics end.
Today, I have with me Carolyn Eastman, who's associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University in the US.
So, Carolyn, you are in the midst of a book project that is examining the history of the yellow fever epidemics happening in the 1790s.
So in early America and especially in New York. Can you tell us a little bit about these epidemics?
Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the interesting things about these epidemics was that they, for the most part,
have been overlooked because there were bigger and more extensive epidemics, most notably, of course, in Philadelphia in 1793.
But New York had a serious epidemic in 1795 and again in 1798.
And it was still early enough in the U.S. has experience of yellow fever that people weren't quite sure that it was yellow fever.
And so you find a lot of people refusing to use that term at all and simply calling it the prevailing fever or the malignant fever.
And yet, you know, a few thousand people died in New York over the course of this period.
And so what I'm interested in is, you know, in the wake of the cold,
the disaster that hit New York so seriously trying to understand New York's experience with an earlier epidemic.
Trying to understand how the people responded.
How the especially the both black and white New Yorkers responded with a lot of black New Yorkers winding up on
the front lines of the epidemic as nurses and caregivers and grave diggers and and then trying to understand,
you know, in line with your project how the epidemic ended and and really whether it ended.
So what kind of sources do you use? Because I think you've worked a lot on the history of the early America's social history and cultural history.
What kind of sources do you use to try to understand the course of this epidemic in the 1790s?
I have been using everything I possibly can.
So I started with a lot of sort of classic social and cultural history, sauces, things like letters and diaries.
And in fact, for New York, during this period, those sources are plentiful.
Many people, including at least three doctors who again served on the front lines of the disease, kept diaries during that period.
And so I can see on a sort of day by day basis how people were responding and trying to address the disease.
But just lately, I've really begun to see this as an urban history story and have been using a lot of city sources,
not just sources from the Common Council of New York,
which was effectively the City Council trying to figure out what to do and how to quarantine
people and how to prevent possibly sick people from other disease leading cities coming in,
but also how they mobilised a really massive health committee apparatus to address the two epidemics.
And so I think in the end, because yellow fever was a disease that, you know,
we now know was spread by mosquitoes, people debated furiously how it spread at the time they had.
They had no solutions. They had no answers to that question. And so they were trying to combat the disease on a lot of different levels.
Everything from cleaning up the streets with the belief that possibly the disease emerged sort of organically from the,
you know, the noxious fumes from rotting garbage and stagnant water to a contagious disease that spread between people.
They had they had no clue. And so what they were trying to do was come at it on all kinds of different levels,
figuring out how to keep the streets clean and how to keep sick people out of the city,
and especially how to manage the constant influx of ships into the harbour,
the ships that might be carrying sick people and noxious fumes and, you know, noxious Bluebeard, as they sometimes called it.
So, yeah, it really is on some level a city issue.
The disease hit city is especially hard. So then tell me a little bit about the course of the epidemic, and most importantly,
how did the epidemics of yellow fever and for the City of New York?
Yeah, the the disease was something that hit the city every year, starting in 1795 and 17.
In 1795, they had about 800 people die in New York and it was it was really alarming
because they had seen a much worse disease hit Philadelphia two years earlier.
But then in 1796, they had more sick.
In 97, they had more. And then in 1798, the city was hit with an incredible downpour of rain in August, so that in fact,
they talked about it raining like cats and dogs for five hours straight,
a rain that was so serious that it came down chimneys and blew out fires and everything else.
And and after that, the city got hit with a massive heat wave.
So between all that water standing in people's basements, in the streets and so on.
Mosquitoes were everywhere, and the city was by the end of the month,
just inundated to the point that it was really difficult to even know how to feed people, how to make sure that they could take care of the sick.
And and yet, I mean, you know,
what's interesting to me increasingly as I've as worked on this project and I've only worked on it since April of 2020, I mean,
inspired by what I was watching in New York and in that month, I I began thinking of this as the kind of epidemic that we imagined before 2020, right?
The kind of epidemic that ends that, you know,
we solve a problem and increasingly both with what we've observed with COVID and what I've seen in the records for New York in the 1790s,
it sort of never ended. And so I think the real story that I'm finding here is partly about if you're going to talk about how the epidemic ends,
you have to talk about for whom. Right.
So for wealthy people, wealthy people were simply able to move into the countryside and August stay until November, when the freezes came.
And as we now know, the mosquitoes died.
They knew that the fever always died away after the frost after serious cold weather set in, but the poor were not able to do that.
The poor were always going to be remaining in the city and trying to address the problem.
And and that, I think, is a very serious divide.
When you start to think about how an epidemic ends,
we really begin to take into account how serious an epidemic is for people who don't have a lot of options.
But then the other part of the story about how the epidemic ends is about the city of New York and
the way that I'm just now beginning to sort of come to grips with how very seriously city leaders,
aldermen and doctors took this disease and tried to figure out solutions so that they could mitigate the problems going forward.
And especially after the 1798 epidemic, when several thousand people died in New York,
they began to really put into place a massive city apparatus for dealing with disease,
for treating the sick, for burying the dead and for quarantining people.
And I think that's a really interesting story when it comes to urban history.
That is really fascinating and a very good reminder about thinking about the social, the social context of endings, I suppose one could say,
and also thinking about the longer history that we have of thinking about the long
duration of epidemics and the ways in which they might might not entirely end.
So thank you very much, Caroline, for sharing your research and your expertise with us.
And thank you all for watching this video. I hope you will take a chance to watch some of the other videos in the how academics and projects,
and please do fill out a feedback form to to help support research at the University of Oxford.