U.S. National Institutes of Health

An Account of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the Malignant Fever, Lately Present in Philadelphia, James Hardie, Philadelphia, 1793

Courtesy National Library of Medicine

James Hardie, a Quaker, observed that yellow fever complicated social hierarchies. He noted that, as the disease spread, white residents became ever-more dependent on the charity of “the poor; the despised blacks.”

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