Radical Rx: Fighting Racism, Enslavement, and an Epidemic in 1793

Reverends Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, founders of the Free African Society, worked as and recruited Black nurses during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia at the behest of white medical and political leaders who falsely claimed the disease did not affect Black persons. In a coauthored pamphlet published just months after the epidemic, Jones and Allen intervened in the medical and print discourses of their day to correct narratives of immunity that cultured Black persons’ deaths as ungrievable and to fight back against printed accounts of “extortion” by Black nurses that threatened to further entrench systemic notions of Black violability and disposability. Their protest pamphlet challenges structural violence and demands abolition, arguments that still inform our thinking about racism, health, and justice today. Jones and Allen’s pamphlet, perhaps the first text copyrighted by African Americans, challenged the racialized “science” and writing of leading physicians and journalists, including Dr. Benjamin Rush and printer Mathew Carey. It critiqued not only the era’s science but also its capitalistic practices that both championed the enslavement of Black persons and denied free Black medical workers fair pay, even as white people would not perform such work. Jones and Allen engage with discourses of blood, bloodletting, and bloodshed to link their medical work with the revolution then taking place in Haiti. Using such imagery, they diagnose the American body politic as ill and in need of bleeding. A look to 1793’s yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia – and Black nurses’ response to it – sheds light on the failings of the United States to contain COVID-19 and to protect its Black citizens, medical professionals and laypersons alike, in the face of white supremacy and yet another deadly virus more than two hundred years later.