Please, Not the Hospital!
Set against the backdrop of the devastating Yellow Fever epidemic that shook Philadelphia in the fall of 1793, Charles Brockden Brown's novel Arthur Mervyn, or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 raises fascinating questions about city life and the cosmopolitan consciousness under duress. The fever is an urban crisis that tests and (possibly) strengthens civic bonds. Brockden Brown portrays the fever as miasmic. Like many others of his time, Brown believed that the disease was carried by "bad air"—and that certain spaces (like houses) could become infected and contagious. Though Yelow Fever in this novel is not directly transmitted from one person to another, carriers can infect the people who live with them by infecting the space. How does this motif carry over into the novel's other concerns—namely, with the webs of fraud and deceit that dominate Book One and the more positive connections Arthur makes in Book Two?
Charles Brockden Brown Society Website
Philadelphia Under Siege by Samuel A. Gum
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