They couldn’t. It was 1795, and the yellow fever—which had burned through Philadelphia two years earlier, killing more than 10 percent of the city’s population—had arrived in New York.

Yellow fever appeared in the U.S. in the late 17th ... sometimes thousands in a single summer. 1. Philadelphia; August-November 1793; approximately 5,000 dead This outbreak killed about 10% ...

Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic of 1793 was the largest in the history of the United States, claiming the lives of nearly 4000 people. In late summer, as the number of deaths began to climb ...