Purge and Bleed

Explaining the deadly stasis of American medicine in the nineteenth century The 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia was a shock to the system of American medicine—or it should have been. In the decades that followed the most infamous health crisis of the early republic, American doctors by and large failed to move beyond ancient ideas of disease and treatment. The contentiousness of Philadelphia’s medical community, led by Benjamin Rush, prevented any meaningful advances in response to th