174 Thomas Apel, Yellow Fever in the Early American Republic




Ben Franklin's World show

Summary: Doctors have declared 2018's seasonal flu epidemic to be one of the worst to hit the United States in over a decade. Yet this flu epidemic is nothing compared to the yellow fever epidemics that struck the early American republic during the 1790s and early 1800s. So what happened when epidemic diseases took hold in early America? How did early Americans deal with disease and illness? Historian Thomas Apel has some answers for us.