That’s how our our 19th Century counterparts responded to what must have been for them the high anxiety of an Ebola-like killer disease arriving in town.
On Sept. 1, 1822, the the town’s health board declared that no vessels, of sail or steam, hailing from anywhere in New York City or Long Island, would be allowed to enter the inner harbor beyond a quarantine line.
That’s because the dreaded yellow fever had been rampaging already for three months in New York City. This 19th-century killer of thousands was little understood, but the Board of Health was fairly certain its point of entry was a town’s port and that it festered among mounds of garbage, coffee, or any strong-smelling “filth.”
Read all about it — and hear about it too — in today’s episode of “This Day In New Haven History,” where the New Haven Museum’s Jason Bischoff-Wurstle and I discuss the kind of regular panic that ensued during the summer when this mosquito-born disease, beginning with a particularly terrible loss of life in Philadelphia in 1793, ravaged populations in American cities. Listen by clicking on the episode above, or finding it later in iTunes or any podcast app under “WNHH Community Radio.”
