Keeping the Mail Germ-Free

If the Postal Service begins zapping our mail with radiation, it won't be the first time efforts have been made to keep the mail germ free. During the yellow fever epidemics that struck major American cities in the 1790s, it was common to smoke letters. We know now that the yellow fever virus cannot be spread through the mail (unless an infected mosquito flies out of the envelope!) but in the 1790s the disease was a terrifying mystery.

In late August 1793 the Pennsylvania Assembly faced a quandary not unlike Congress faced with the discovery of anthrax in the Hart Office Building, and they reacted in much the same way. They came to the State House in Philadelphia on the morning of Thursday August 28 knowing that cases of yellow fever were reported near the docks six blocks away. Then suddenly the fever was uncomfortably close. One legislator explained in his diary,"a young man by the name of Fry is lying dead at the west end of the State House." Fry was the son of the State House doorkeeper. The legislature adjourned to Monday while the building was cleaned.

However, there was no stopping yellow fever, and panic spread. No terrorist planted the seeds of yellow. It probably came to the city in mosquitos stowing away on one of the ships coming from the West Indies. Doctors blamed contagion spreading from the sick helped along by heat, humidity, and unhealthy gases created by garbage and filth. Smoke was used to purify the air. Before church services Rev. Henry Helmuth used the smoke from burning juniper berries. Others exploded gunpowder in the streets and in rooms of houses. For the Haines family, where a mother lay dying, the smoke came from cigars. People who relied on smoke were the brave ones. Most simply avoided the sick and hired African American nurses, mistakenly thought to be immune to the fever. The city organized a hospital outside the city for people with no one to care for them. Despite these efforts, even as thousands of citizens fled, roughly 5,000 people in the city of 50,000 died.

Adding to the terror was the way people died with delirium, then prostration, and then uncontrollable hiccuping, hemorrhaging and vomiting of black matter. The Cipro of that day was a pill that combined two violent purgatives, calomel, a poisonous mercury compound, and jalap, a Mexican herb. Dr. Benjamin Rush urged the pill, which we suspect today was ineffective and harmful, not only as a treatment for the disease but as a preventative. To match the tremendous force of yellow fever, Rush also urged that patients be copiously bled, losing up to a pound of blood a day. One virtue of the harsh treatment was that it prostrated patients during the full course of the disease saving them from the extreme paroxysms of the fever.

The hard freezes of early November ended the epidemic, and cleanliness was the order of the day. Yet yellow fever returned to Philadelphia in 1797, 98, and 99, and other cities had epidemics. In the fall of 1798, Philadelphia was officially evacuated, with the poor invited to come to tent encampments outside the city, and thousands fled New York City. Several other cities from Wilmington to Boston had epidemics. Contemporaries estimated that 10,000 people died.

Thomas Jefferson opined that the yellow fever epidemics spelled the doom of large cities. For the rich a summer retreat became a necessity. Many blamed foreigners or the poor for engendering the disease. After some initial efforts at concealing the horrors of the epidemic, city leaders faced them openly and critically examined their responses to each one. People never gave up the hope that the epidemics could be prevented. Philadelphia and New York created municipal water systems, out houses were purified with lime, and quarantines were strengthened. Fortunately, thousands infected with yellow fever had mild cases, and that exposure gave lifetime immunity. Between 1801 and 1807 the virulence of epidemics in Philadelphia and New York decreased. Some 400 died in Philadelphia in 1805. Limited epidemics struck northern cities again from 1819 to 1821.

As President George Washington left Philadelphia on September 10, 1793, to lay the cornerstone of the Capitol, he invited Samuel Powel, a former mayor of Philadelphia, to join him. Powel declined telling Washington that he might be carrying the seeds of the disease and if he got it, he wished to be in the city,"the only spot where physicians [were] conversant with the disorder." On September 29 Powel died of the fever. Dr. Walter Reed proved the insect transmission of yellow fever in 1900 and in 1929 doctors at the Rockefeller Institute proved that it was a virus which soon led to the development of a vaccine. In both efforts researchers died of the fever. Yet, progress eventually vindicated the trust that Powel and others had that flight was no solution.