Word of the disease in New York City came “from every quarter.” The place was “besieged.” Thousands fled to the countryside—so many that transportation became impossible to find. Others huddled inside their homes. Many died. Hospitals were overrun, and nurses and doctors were among the earliest to succumb. People who ventured out held a handkerchief up to their nose and mouth, fearful of what they might breathe in. Wild claims about miracle drugs and regimens tricked some into believing they could outwit the disease. They couldn’t.
It was 1795, and the yellow fever—which had burned through Philadelphia two years earlier, killing more than 10 percent of the city’s population—had arrived in New York. It would return in 1798, and those two epidemics killed between 3,000 and 3,500 New Yorkers. Hundreds in other parts of the East Coast died in localized outbreaks, almost always in urban centers.
A lethal, highly contagious disease that tears through urban populations and shuts down normal life is a phenomenon we can appreciate during the Covid-19 pandemic. Recognizing these parallels, I revisited a startlingly detailed account of those terrifying outbreaks of more than 200 years ago—a young physician’s unpublished diary, which I came across in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. It’s an extraordinary, closely observed chronicle of a young man’s life and how the disease changed it.
The Manhattan-born Alexander Anderson—or Sandy, as friends and family called him—wrote with great curiosity about the world around him, and even sketched images in the margins. His personality leaps from the page. The diary fills three volumes, the first of which he began in 1793 as a 17-year-old medical student at Columbia. Yellow fever would have such a profound impact on him that he would eventually leave medicine to work instead as an artisan, becoming a renowned engraver. An unfinished portrait of him in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows a wide, friendly face with black hair and eyes, evoking the openness with which he seemed to approach life.
In 1795, with the number of yellow fever cases growing alarmingly, the city of New York opened Bellevue Hospital, where doctors could isolate the seriously ill. It stood several miles upriver from the densely populated area of Lower Manhattan where Sandy Anderson still lived with his parents. Desperate for medical help, the city’s Health Committee hired him as a medical resident at the hospital. The pay was good because the risks were so high; doctors did not know what caused the disease, nor how it spread.