IN-PERSON: Prague – Section B

Abstract

What we have experienced as new and unprecedented during COVID-19 is in fact deeply rooted in history, in institutions, and in built environments. The trauma of a 21st-century pandemic calls us to reflect on our centuries of experience with epidemics and how they have been incorporated—or not—in public memory. My paper examines the ways in which outbreaks of yellow fever, cholera, influenza, and AIDS in Philadelphia have been commemorated, and situates those examples within the broader global landscape of monumentality and memorials. Our confrontation with epidemics takes place in and through particular spaces; I approach this history from the perspective of a forgotten place in Philadelphia’s history: the old Lazaretto quarantine station on the Delaware River, built after four devastating yellow fever epidemics in the 1790s. Documenting the history of this institution and working to preserve the Lazaretto site has shown me that attention to spaces of quarantine, caregiving, activism, and protest can illuminate the hidden dimensions of epidemics that reveal a society’s underlying strengths and fractures. Philadelphians today are working through the memory of past epidemics. How to commemorate the free Blacks who volunteered to transport and treat patients and bury corpses during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793, only to be accused of theft and profiteering; or the Irish immigrant workers who arrived during the 1832 cholera and disappeared while building a railroad, likely murdered by xenophobic vigilantes; and the 200,000 patriotic citizens who marched in a war bonds parade in 1918, thereby accelerating the spread of the influenza that decimated the city in the ensuing weeks? I review commemorations of these epidemics, from traditional monuments to public processions, artistic interventions, and oral history events. Remembering epidemics can remind us of how our world came to be the way it is, and how we might make it more just and healthier in the future.