Abstract
Just after Philadelphia’s outbreak of yellow fever began to abate in November 1793, physician Samuel Stearns published An Account of the Terrible Effects of the Pestilential Infection. Although clearly more a medical man than a poet, Stearns employs a literary form to express his outrage over the outbreak’s high mortality rate. His choice of a more subjective genre underscores the poem’s main theme, which argues that a moral, rather than a medical, failure caused the death of roughly 10 percent of the city’s 55,000 residents:
Some dy’d, no doubt, for want of proper care! Distressed objects on their beds did lie; The want of help produc’d a dismal cry! Their friends gone off, and their kind neighbors fled, That they might not be number’d with the dead! Whilst death and horror spread themselves around, Young children were by their dead mothers found! A shocking sight, indeed, for to behold! Made the spectator’s very blood run cold!1
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Notes
Samuel Stearns, An Account of the Terrible Effects of the Pestilential Infection (Providence: William Child, 1793), 3
See Matthew Carey, A Short Account of the Malignant Fever Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia (New York: Arno, 1970)
John Harvey Powell, Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793 (New York: Arno, 1970)
J. Worth Estes, A Melancholy Scene of Devastation: The Public Response to the 1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 1997).
See Nancy Stepan, “The Interplay between Socio-Economic Factors and Medical Science: Yellow Fever Research, Cuba and the United States.” Social Studies of Science 8:4 (November 1978): 397–423.
Thomas Monath, “Yellow Fever: A Medically Neglected Disease.” Reviews of Infectious Diseases 9:1 (1987): 170.
Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn or Memoirs of the Year 1793, eds. Sydney J. Krause and S.W. Reid (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2002), 3.
See William Dunlap, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown (Philadelphia: James Parke, 1815), 2:15
Harry Warfel, “Charles Brockden Brown’s German Sources.” Modern Language Quarterly 1:3 (1940): 357–65
Thomas Haviland, “Preciosité Crosses the Atlantic.” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 59:1 (March 1944): 131–41.
Louis Kirk McAuley, “‘Periodical Visitations’: Yellow Fever as Yellow Journalism in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 19:3 (Spring 2007): 309.
See, R. Darrell Meadows, “Engineering Exile: Social Networks and the French Atlantic Community, 1789–1809.” French Historical Studies 23:1 (Winter 2000): 67–102.
See Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro, Introduction to Ormond; or, The Secret Witness (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009), xv–xvi.
See Bryan Waterman], “Arthur Mervyn’s Medical Repository and the Early Republic’s Knowledge Industries.” American Literary History 15:2 (Summer 2003): 213–14
Siân Silyn Roberts, “Gothic Enlightenment: Contagion and Community in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn.” Early American Literature 44:2 (2009): 307–32.
Charles Brockden Brown, The Rhapsodist and Other Uncollected Writings, ed. Harry R. Warfel (New York: Delmar, 1971), 150.
See Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)
Julia Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)
David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1810 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
See David Larson, “Arthur Mervyn, Edgar Huntly and the Critics.” Essays in Literature 15:2 (1988): 207–19
R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 92–8
James Russo, “The Chameleon of Convenient Vice: A Study of the Narrative of Arthur Mervyn.” Studies in the Novel 11 (1979): 318–405.
See William Sloan and Julie Hedgepeth, The Early American Press (Westport, CN: Greenwood, 1994)
David Copeland, Colonial American Newspapers (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997)
Mary Ellen Zuckerman, A History of Popular Women’s Magazines in the United States (Westport, CN: Greenwood, 1998).
Mark Kamrath and Sharon M. Harris, Introduction to Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2005), xi–xxvii.
Steven Frye, “Constructing Indigeneity: Postcolonial Dynamics and Charles Brockden Brown’s Monthly Magazine and American Review.” American Studies 39 (1998): 76.
See Jared Gardner, “The Literary Museum and the Unsettling of the Early American Novel.” English Literary History 67:3 (Fall 2000): 743–71.
Norman Grabo, “Historical Essay” in Arthur Mervyn or Memoirs of the Year 1793, eds. Sydney J. Krause and S.W. Reid (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2002), 455.
Kenneth E. Carpenter, “Libraries” in “An Extensive Republic.” In A History of the Book in America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 2
David Leverenz, “Men Writing in the Early Republic” in “An Extensive Republic.” In A History of the Book in America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 2:356.
See Paul Witherington, “Charles Brockden Brown: A Bibliographical Essay.” Early American Literature 9 (1974): 173.
William Currie, A Description of the Malignant, Infectious Fever Prevailing at Present in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: T. Dobson, 1793), 3–4.
Absalom Jones and Richard Allan, A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People during the late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia in the Year 1793 (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1794), 8.
Martin Snyder, City of Independence: Views of Philadelphia Before 1800 (New York: Praeger, 1975), 147.
See Sean Goudie, “On the Origin of American Specie(s): The West Indies, Classification, and the Emergence of Supremacist Consciousness in Arthur Mervyn.” In Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early Republic (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 60–87.
Martin S. Pernick, “Politics, Parties, and Pestilence: Epidemic Yellow Fever in Philadelphia and the Rise of the First Party System.” William and Mary Quarterly 29:4 (October 1972): 579.
Jean Devèze, An Enquiry into, and Observations upon the Causes and Effects of the Epidemic Disease, which raged in Philadelphia from the Month of August till towards the Middle of December, 1793 (Philadelphia: Patent, 1794), 26.
Charles Lawrence, History of the Philadelphia Almshouses and Hospitals (New York: Arno, 1905), 42.
Charles Brockden Brown, Ormond; or The Secret Witness, eds. Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009), 40.
Carl Ostrowski, “‘Fated to Perish by Consumption’: The Political Economy of Arthur Mervyn.” Studies in American Fiction 32:1 (2004): 10.
See David F. Norton, “Francis Hutcheson in America.” SVEC 14 (1976): 1547–68
Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978).
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967).
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1875), 323.
Peter Kafer, Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
Benjamin Rush, Account of the Bilious Remitting Yellow Fever, as it Appeared in the City of Philadelphia in the Year 1793 (Philadelphia: Dobson, 1794).
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© 2013 Ellen Malenas Ledoux
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Ledoux, E.M. (2013). “Schemes of Reformation”. In: Social Reform in Gothic Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137302687_5
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