Fever 1793

Philadelphia, 1793. Fourteen-year-old Mattie Cook wants to expand the coffeehouse run by her widowed mother, but deaths near the waterfront announce the arrival of yellow fever. As the epidemic spreads, customers flee, public order deteriorates and the national capital becomes a city of shuttered homes, carts carrying the dead and medical arguments over treatment. When her mother falls ill, Mattie leaves Philadelphia with her grandfather and discovers that escape offers little protection.

Separated from family and forced to act for herself, Mattie eventually reaches the Bush Hill hospital reorganised by Stephen Girard and is treated by Jean Devèze. The novel contrasts Devèze’s supportive care with the harsher bleeding and purging associated with Benjamin Rush, while also recognising the work of Philadelphia’s Black community during the crisis. Mattie’s survival becomes a coming-of-age story about disease, grief, commerce and rebuilding in the early American republic.