Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia

by Mathew Carey

Excerpt from A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in With a Statement of the Proceedings That Took Place on the Subject in Different Parts of the United States Defirous of having this account c0rre t and com plete, i have printed off but a final] number of copies of the prefent edition and {hall cfieem my. Felf moft partrcularl'y obliged to any perfon who will be fo kind to point out errors, to be correct ed in, or fuggcl't faéts, to be added to, a new editi on, whichlprbpofe to put to prefs very fobn, and which will, I hope, be found more ample than the prefent one. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

164 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1970

About the author

Mathew Carey (1760–1839) was an Irish-born American publisher and economist who lived and worked in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the father of economist Henry Charles Carey.

Reviews

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book, originally published November 23, 1793, was made available via the Harvard Library Mirador Viewer - which, if you haven't checked it out yet, is a really neat way to view old documents online (and download copies free of charge). Here is the link to the book:
https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifest...

The book is Matthew Carey's take on the just-concluded yellow fever epidemic of 1793 in Philadelphia. For first-hand accounts, this can be read with Dr. Benjamin Rush's Observations Upon the Origin of The Malignant Bilious, or Yellow Fever in Philadelphia, published in 1799. (Also available through Harvard's open collection). Neither this nor the Rush book has not been re-formatted for modern readers so I found the reading a bit slow as I needed to focus on reading the letter "s" rather than "f" in multiple words.

While I wouldn't call this scintillating, it is a fascinating snapshot on how Philadelphia and its surrounding cities and their denizens dealt with the threat of impending doom, and both how much and how little has changed in 225 years. The characteristics of many cities up and down the East Coast do not seem to have changed much in that time, which I found particularly interesting. While Rush's book focuses on his (entirely incorrect) medical theories and this focuses on the sociocultural issues of the epidemic, both are interesting snapshots of a time gone. Carey also includes a list of the dead, and though I don't believe this is an exhaustive list, it is a noble effort; and a daily record of the temperatures in Philadelphia in August, September, October and early November.

For those interested in contemporaneous accounts of historical events, this is a worthwhile read.

[Paul Motsuk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting to see how disease was dealt with in the late 18th century.