#1386 Yellow Fever with Stephen Fried

Listening to America

Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2020

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"The Yellow Fever was the first epidemic after America became America."

— Stephen Fried

We are joined this week by Stephen Fried, the award-winning journalist and best-selling author who teaches at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. We discuss his biography of Doctor Benjamin Rush and his more recent article, "Yellow Fever Stalks the Founders," published in spring 2020 issue of American Heritage magazine. Fried speaks about how doctors in Philadelphia in 1793 dealt with contagious disease.

"Doctors", Fried writes, "believed that building fires to change the air would be ineffectual, but burning gunpowder could work. In the aromatherapy department, citizens were soon eating or rubbing themselves with garlic, smoking constantly or chewing tobacco, and even dipping pieces of rope into tar to wear around their necks."

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Good Day Thomas Jefferson, our podcast listeners.
0:04.4	We hope you are all safe and your loved ones are healthy and well and safe.
0:11.6	And before we say anything more,
0:14.0	Catherine has come home.
0:16.0	Yes, my dear darling daughter,
0:18.0	Catherine Missouri, Walker Jenkinson is now in the basement of my home here
0:22.0	in Bismarck, North Dakota.
0:23.2	She got out of England just in time.
0:26.0	She would have stayed.
0:26.8	She wanted to stay, but it just wasn't possible
0:29.4	with the Bodleyn Library shut up in her own college,
0:32.0	asked every student, particularly foreign students,
0:35.0	to go home if they possibly could.
0:36.6	So she came here, and thanks to the digital revolution, she's able to continue working on her doctorate
0:41.5	from this house in the middle of the Great Plains,
0:45.0	which is one of the most amazing single factors about this.
0:49.2	You know, in 1990, this would have been a very different plague because we didn't have the internet.
0:54.0	But thanks to the digital revolution and the internet, people are, many of them at least able to work from home.
1:00.0	People are able to do research no matter where they happen to be stationed as long as they have access to a computer and the internet.
1:07.0	And we're able to keep in touch with each other by FaceTime and Skype, by Microsoft's team, and by Zoom and other technologies.
1:14.8	All that differentiates this from every other pandemic in human history and it doesn't exactly
1:19.6	solve the problem, but it certainly e the the sense of social isolation. We need to tell
	...

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