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Philadelphia was a very dirty city-no covered sewers, dead animals were left in the streets. Everything decayed and sent up noxious bubbles of foul air. A disease was coming to this city – 8 deaths in 1 week in 2 houses on the same street. But no-one did anything.
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After studying symptons of people with the disease, Br. Benjamin Rush gave the disease a name: Yellow Fever However, almost everyone else disagreed thinking it would scare the citizens.
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People began to leave the city to get away from the disease.
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Rickett’s Circus was built but it was not a circus. It was a large tent where the sick and dying people were taken.
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At a meeting of the Free African Society which was founded to help people, a letter from Dr. Rush asked them to help with the people who were sick and dying. They helped and they did not catch the fever.
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Dr. Benjamin Rush was very sick. He had a fever and his eyes and skin were yellow. He had the Yellow Fever.
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When the weather turned cold, the disease left the city. In 3 months, 5000 people had died from the plague – one-tenth of the city’s population!
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Toward the late 1800s - early 1900's the cause of Yellow Fever was due to a type of Mosquito called Aedes aegypti that came over to America from Africa. The way the desease was spread was by sucking the blood of a rare monkey and impanting the desease into humans and continueing the cycle from human to human.
