Medical Mansion
Bush Hill, built by Andrew Hamilton, served as a hospital during Philly’s yellow fever epidemic
Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33823936. The drawing, by James Peller Malcolm (1767–1815), shows the country seat of Andrew Hamilton, Esq. Bush Hill was located on lands between Coates Street (now Fairmount Avenue) and Vine Street and between 19th Street and 12th Street in present-day Philadelphia.
Few people in 2023 know that Philadelphia lawyer Andrew (not the more famous Alexander) Hamilton helped build the Pennsylvania State House — now Independence Hall.
Even fewer realize that his impressive manor on the south side of Spring Garden Street — where Community College of Philadelphia stands today — once served as a makeshift hospital during Philadelphia’s disastrous yellow fever epidemic of 1793.
When the deadly epidemic broke out in August 1793, Mayor Matthew Clarkson asked the College of Physicians how the city should handle it.
It was a circus
At first, says George Wilson in his biography of “Stephen Girard: The Life and Times of America’s First Tycoon,” patients were taken to an open-air amphitheater at 12th and Market where Rickett’s Circus had performed earlier in the year.
(The circus was so popular after it opened April 3, 1793, that Ricketts took it on the road for 14 months.)
Once the patients arrived there, the city couldn’t get anyone to take care of them. Bodies just lay there. When area residents threatened to burn down the amphitheater, the city moved to plan B … and Bush Hill.
Bush Hill was the answer
Knowing that William Hamilton, a grandson of Andrew, was living in England and the main building was unoccupied, Philadelphia temporarily confiscated the mansion.
(The city later paid William Hamilton $2,000 for its use of the property during the epidemic.)
Philadelphia’s maiden health efforts at Bush Hill were pitiful. On Sept. 10, 1793, Mayor Matthew Clarkson put an ad in the city’s one remaining newspaper asking citizens to help their community.
Fortunately, among the ten people who showed up and volunteered to help were wealthy tycoon Stephen Girard and cooper Peter Helm.
Girard volunteered to take charge at Bush Hill. And it’s a good thing he did. He fired the four doctors billing the city while working part-time and almost not at all. In the first 15 days of September, Wilson says, the doctors collectively made 12 total visits to Bush Hill.
Girard found two doctors, John Deveze and Benjamin Duffield, who disagreed with the bleeding and purging regimen recommended by prominent Philadelphia physician Dr. Benjamin Rush.
Comfort, wine and creamed rice worked
They chose to keep patients comfortable, giving them quinine, sweetened wine and creamed rice,” says an article by Dennis B. Cornfield, M.D. on mdadvantageonline.com. *
Patients seemed to respond. While about 500 died at Bush Hill, some 4,500 died elsewhere, says George Wilson. With bleeding and purging, Wilson says, “Sometimes it was hard to tell whether victims had been killed by their disease or their doctors.”
Like so many things in the city’s and country’s early days — and much like today — the issues quickly became political and racial.
In Stephen Fried’s book, “Rush: Revolution, Madness & the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father,” the author says: Rush “was coming to believe that anyone who wouldn’t try his methods was doing so for political or personal reasons.”
He adds, “In political circles, Bush Hill became Federalist; since Girard was French, and his best-known doctor, (George) Stevens, was from St. Croix in the French Caribbean, Rush described their approach as ‘the French remedies’ to make them sound vaguely un-American.”
Be bled or be un-American
So if you didn’t want what William Kashatus describes as being bled so extensively “that four-fifths of the total volume of blood or twenty pounds be drawn away,” you were being “un-American” in Rush’s eyes. Got it. Sounds familiar.
Racism also reared its ugly head. Publisher Matthew Carey, who reportedly left town during the epidemic, blasted the Blacks that stayed and helped victims of the epidemic, saying they had “overcharged many people and plundered some of their homes.”
Outraged, Black leaders Absalom Jones and Richard Allen shot back with their own book. First, they had been recruited by Dr. Rush to take care of White people, because he mistakenly thought Blacks were immune from the disease. Then they were blasted by a White publisher who had fled to safety. Their long-titled reply may be the first copyrighted written work by Blacks in America.
Interesting Oddities:
John and Abigail Adams rented Bush Hill in 1790 and 1791, while he was Vice President of the U.S. The house sat on a hill behind what is now the main branch Free Library of Philadelphia
Dr. Deveze received $1,500 for his service, equal to about $39,00 in 2020. Dr. Duffield received $500, or about $13,000 in 2020. But there was no money left to pay Mary Saville, the hospital’s matron. What a shock.
If Philadelphia had the same percent of deaths in an epidemic today, we’d end up burying or cremating more than 150,000 people in just one year. That’s how devastating this epidemic was.
* Note: Dr. Cornfield says he relied a great deal on a 1949 book, “Bring Out Your Dead” by J.H. Powell.
Some Sources:
http://bookbuilder.cast.org/view_print.php?book=30037
https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/contagion/feature/the-yellow-fever-epidemic-in-philadelphia-1793
https://explorepahistory.com/displayimage.php?imgId=1-2-1E02
https://explorepahistory.com/hmarker.php?markerId=1-A-1DB
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-01-02-0098
https://hiddencityphila.org/2012/04/1793-yellow-fever/
http://paheritage.wpengine.com/article/plagued-philadelphias-yellow-fever-epidemic-1793/
https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/yellow-fever/
https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/mansions/
https://www.baldwinparkphilly.org/baldwin-locomotive-works
https://www.baldwinparkphilly.org/why-hamilton-street
https://www.carpentershall.org/the-yellow-fever-connection
https://www.facebook.com/historyofphilly/photos/a.385489028211660/2014201018673778/?type=3
https://www.jnorman.com/pages/books/40916/jean-deveze/autograph-letter-signed
http://paheritage.wpengine.com/article/plagued-philadelphias-yellow-fever-epidemic-1793/
https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/hall-of-fame/stephen-girard/
http://www.shoppbs.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/adams/timeline/timeline2.html
http://www.stephengirard.org/p/blog-page_19.html
https://www.theclio.com/tour/1502/9
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tumh3-jrbg
Fried, Stephen. “Rush, Benjamin: Rush: Revolution, Madness & the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father.” New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2018.
Powell, J.H. “Bring Out Your Dead.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949.
Wilson, George. “Stephen Girard: The Life and Times of America’s First Tycoon. Brattelboro,” VTL: Echo Point Books & Media, 1995.