Chapter Book 11 / An American Plague

Title	An American Plague
Author	Jim Murphy
Illustrator
Awards	Robert F. Sibert Award
Publisher	Clarion Books
ISBN	0-395-77608-2
Readability Score (GLE = Grade Level Equivalent)	Lexile	1130L
	DRA	50
	GLE	8.9
	Guided Reading	V
Genre /      Sub-Genre	Chapter Book / Informational
Theme	Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793
Primary Character
Classroom Use	I would use this book to teach about Colonial America and disease.
Summary	In the late summer of 1793, Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital was hit by a horrifying epidemic. Hundreds of people were falling ill to yellow fever. There was no cure and at the time the cause of the disease was also unknown. Wealthy citizens and most of the national, state, and city government fled the city to avoid the fever. Those who remained struggled to care for the sick and dying while maintaining order in an abandoned city. In a city of 30,000 people (the largest city in the US at the time) between 3000 and 5000 people eventually died of the yellow fever that year. This is the story of how half the city’s residents fled and half of those who remained died; neighboring towns, cities and states barricaded themselves; Washington himself fled, setting off a constitutional crisis; and bloodletting caused blood to run through the streets. It is also the story of a little known chapter in Black History in which free blacks nursed the sick only to be later condemned for their heroic efforts. It would be over a hundred years before doctors finally discovered the way the fever was spread (a type of mosquito, of course) and it was the mid-twentieth century before scientists created a vaccine for the yellow fever. There is still no known cure. ·