Fever 1793 Book Pdf

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August 1793. Fourteen-year-old Mattie Cook is ambitious, adventurous, and sick to death of listening to her mother. Mattie has plans of her own. She wants to turn the Cook Coffeehouse into the finest business in Philadelphia, the capital of the new United States.

In 1993 I read a newspaper article about a Philadelphia museum exhibit that marked the 200-year anniversary of the epidemic. That article made me curious, so I visited an archive to do some primary source research and became hooked!

The plot revolves entirely around the yellow fever pandemic and is primarily character-driven. The hysteria in 1793 was very real, probably worse than it is now without easy access to social media. Almost every decision made by Mattie and the other characters connects to the yellow fever, as well as decisions made by others that impact them.

Overall, I give Fever, 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson 4.5 stars. It took me a few days to read, a relief these days. The writing and storytelling sucked me in once I got into the swing of reading. Mattie Cook was a great heroine who felt like a real 1700s American teenager. If you can handle it and if you like books about pandemics, particularly historical ones, I would highly recommend Fever, 1793.

Published in 2000, Fever 1793 is a young adult novel that tells the story of a 14-year-old girl named Mattie Cook, who fights to survive the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 in Philadelphia. The historical novel by Laurie Halse Anderson (b. 1961) depicts 1793 America through the eyes of Mattie, who, when the fever hits in late August, struggles to live in a city overtaken by fear. Demonstrating the ongoing alarm over unknown illnesses during this time, Fever 1793 provides a sense of the daily life of Philadelphians in the early national period. The novel demonstrates the historical significance of the epidemic, which took an estimated five thousand lives, and gives readers a glimpse of public health crises and medical treatments available in the eighteenth century.

Anderson, a New York Times best-selling author of the award-winning young adult novels Speak (1999) and Chains (2008), conceived the idea for Fever 1793 after reading a newspaper article about the yellow fever epidemic while her family was stuck in traffic on the Schuylkill Expressway, driving into Philadelphia. Anderson then lived in the city and worked as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Always interested in historical fiction, she began research in 1993 for Fever 1793 by examining primary sources at the Historical Society of Philadelphia and consulting historians at Independence National Historical Park and the Mtter Museum of the College of Physicians.

Megan Walter is completing her M.A. in English at Rutgers University-Camden. While in elementary school, she wrote her first-ever book report on Fever 1793 and the historic significance of the epidemic. After receiving her B.A. in English Education, she assigned the novel to her own students while teaching high school English at a public school near Richmond, Virginia. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Laurie Halse Anderson is a New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction and numerous other honors. Born on October 23, 1961, she grew up in Potsdam, New York, and she developed an interest in writing and reading historical fiction at a young age. In 1984, she graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in languages and linguistics. After this, she worked as a freelance reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and she began writing novels, eventually publishing her first book, Ndito Runs, in 1996. In 1999, Anderson wrote her award-winning novel Speak, which tells the story of a high school girl who is sexually assaulted; it was adapted to film, featuring Kristen Stewart in 2004.

In 1793 Philadelphia was the nation's largest city and its capital, home to prominent citizens like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton. It was also the site of the most fearsome epidemic to strike the young nation.

The First Cases
Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the city's most prominent physicians and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was called to the home of Dr. Hugh Hodge on August 5. Hodge's young daughter was jaundiced, suffering from a high fever, and vomiting blood. She died that day. Over the next two weeks, Rush saw many more patients with the same symptoms, several of whom also died. On August 21, he told Mayor Matthew Clarkson that unsanitary conditions in the bustling city were causing a yellow fever epidemic.

Conflicting Theories
Not everyone agreed on the cause. While Rush determined that the illness originated locally, the governor blamed foreigners from the West Indies. Other doctors argued that the disease had arrived on boats from the Caribbean and supported a quarantine of the vessels and passengers. Doctors also disagreed about treatment, with some advocating bleeding and purging while others proposed milder remedies such as teas and cold baths. Regardless, nothing was working to stem the crisis.

"Quit the City"
The mayor convened the College of Physicians, which on August 27 advised people to avoid infected cases if possible and keep the streets clean, among other measures. Rush beseeched all "that can move, to quit the city." About 20,000 people fled, including George Washington, who explained that "as Mrs. Washington was unwilling to leave me surrounded by the malignant fever which prevailed, I could not think of hazarding her and the Children any longer by my continuance in the city, the house in which we lived being, in a manner, blockaded, by the disorder." Thomas Jefferson observed: "Everybody who can, is fleeing from the city, and the panic of the country people is likely to add famine to the disease." Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton left also but not before contracting the disease. He recovered but as he fled to Albany was treated as an outcast, a treatment typically afforded sick refugees.

Fear Rushes In
As the deadly disease spread, Irish American publisher Mathew Carey chronicled the reaction of city residents who remained: "The consternation of the people of Philadelphia, at this period, was carried beyond all bounds. Dismay and affright were visible in almost every person's countenance." Acquaintances and friends avoided each other in the street, he noted. In some households, family members were banished into the street when they complained of a headache, a common precursor to yellow fever. "Parents desert their children as soon as they are infected," lamented Rush, "and in every room you enter you see no person but a solitary black man or woman near the sick."

Serving the Afflicted
Indeed, most of the black residents of Philadelphia remained in the city and helped the stricken white residents. Members of Philadelphia's African Society, who held the common belief that black people were immune to the disease, offered their services to the mayor, fulfilling many responsibilities abandoned by white residents. The mayor would later write of the volunteer effort among black residents: "Their diligence, attention and decency of deportment, afforded me, at the time, much satisfaction." The belief in immunity turned out to be unfounded; 240 black residents died of yellow fever.

A Welcome Frost
On September 12, Mayor Clarkson warned a group of citizens that the city was approaching anarchy. At the time, the epidemic was worsening, with deaths ranging from 67 on September 16 to 96 on September 24. The city's burial grounds were nearly filled. Meanwhile, cities in surrounding states established quarantine houses or roadblocks to stop Philadelphians from entering. October brought higher death tolls but also relief. At the end of the month, a welcomed frost, which had been known to end previous epidemics, arrived. On October 31, a white flag flew over the city hospital, signifying that no yellow fever patients remained. The disease caused an estimated 5,000 deaths that year in Philadelphia, about a tenth of the residents of the city and its suburbs.

When Black neighborhoods across America erupted in violence in the summer of 1967, President Johnson appointed a commission to find the cause for the unrest. Their findings offered an unvarnished assessment of American race relations.

Cuando una ola de violencia se apoder de barrios negros por todo Estados Unidos en el verano de 1967, el presidente Johnson nombr una comisin para encontrar la causa de los disturbios. Sus hallazgos ofrecieron una evaluacin honesta de las relaciones raciales estadounidenses.

In the late 1970s, residents of Love Canal in Niagara Falls, NY discovered their neighborhood had been built on a former chemical waste dump. Housewives activated to create a grassroots movement that galvanized the landmark Superfund Bill.

In response to his groundbreaking theory on the cause of yellow fever, Carlos Finlay was called a "crank" and a "crazy old man." The derision hurt the doctor whose homeland was devastated by the disease, but he would live to see his work vindicated.

Mattie is a young girl of fourteen, innocent, always trying to get out of work so she can enjoy her life. She has to grow up and take on the responsibilities of adulthood, with much resistance, when the fever hits.

Thieves break into the coffeehouse once again, and grandfather is over-stressed during the confrontation. He passes away. Now, Mattie is on her own. The decisions she makes going forward show her growing up and making adult decisions in just a few short months. She finds Eliza, takes in an orphaned girl, and together, her and Eliza take care of as many sick people as they can. A friend, Nathaniel, helps them as they reestablish the coffeehouse.

Fourteen-year-old Mattie Cook lives with her widowed mother above the Philadelphia coffee shop they own and helps run the family business. She dislikes doing chores and has grand dreams to someday turn the shop into something far more than what it currently is. But in the summer of 1793, an epidemic of yellow fever breaks out, leaving the city reeling and turning Mattie's world upside down. People she's known all her life are falling ill and dying, and then her own mother takes ill, too. When her mother makes a fevered plea for Mattie to leave the city, she heads for a nearby town with her grandfather. But soon they learn that the disease is everywhere and they can't outrun it. Eventually young Mattie must learn how to survive in a city that seems to have gone mad, and gradually she finds the strength and determination within herself to make her own way in the world.

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