The Heberden Society presents Carolyn Eastman, PhD

On the Front Lines of New York City's Yellow Fever Epidemics

Please join the Heberden Society on Tuesday, April 8, 2025 at 5 PM EST for "On the Front Lines of New York City's Yellow Fever Epidemics."

We know a lot about New York’s 18th-century doctors, who left behind diaries and letters and accounts of their work. We know far less about front-line workers such as gravediggers, those who provided food and firewood to the poor, and nurses, who were often working-class women and men who played extraordinarily important roles during the yellow fever epidemics that slammed the city in the 1790s. This talk explores front-line workers and the mixed-race hospital staffs they formed to care for the ill during a period of great change and uncertainty in New York City.

Carolyn Eastman is Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University, book review editor for the William and Mary Quarterly, and president-elect of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR). She is the author of the prizewinning A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution (2009), and The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States’ First Forgotten Celebrity (2021), the latter of which received the SHEAR James Bradford Best Biography prize and the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction. She is developing a book on Black and white New Yorkers’ experiences with the yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s, seeking to understand how the disease changed people’s lives as well as the city itself.

This is a hybrid lecture. Onsite attendance is available in the Belfer Building (413 E. 69th St.) in conference room 302AB. A recording of the lecture is available here.