| This dissertation explores how ideas about collective health and well being shaped the currents of political development in the city and the port of Philadelphia over the course of the eighteenth century. Through official public records, private diaries and letters, medical texts and theories, the popular press, and other sources, it argues that health and disease were omnipresent concerns among the residents, that they believed they could ameliorate health risks through collective action, and that their notions about the relationship of physical and political health inflected the language of politics in Philadelphia in the colonial, revolutionary, and early national periods.; The first half of the dissertation examines the development of Philadelphia as a colonial society, and how ideas about health and disease shaped that development. To understand how medical concerns shaped political debates, it is necessary first to understand the state of medical thinking in the late seventeenth century. To that end, Chapter 1, "A Rude Place & an Unpolisht Man," explores the intellectual universe of the people who planted Philadelphia, the role of medical thinking in the planning and settlement of the city. By comparing the experience of Philadelphia with that of the contemporary proprietary capital of Charles Town, the chapter illustrates how issues of collective health could quickly escalate into political crises, pitting colonial proprietors against their tenants. Chapter 2, "At Whose Door the Failure Ought to Lye," considers how confrontations over medical questions fit into broader ideas about the city's relationship to a wider world, as the flows of immigration that fueled Pennsylvania's dramatic growth sparked institutional conflict between the provincial executive and legislative over how to respond to outbreaks of disease among the new arrivals. Chapter 3, "A Body Corporate and Politick," finds Philadelphia in full flower, with a newly confident class of colonial leaders pondering how their prosperity might be deployed to solve ongoing problems of illness among the indigent, and the environmental health hazards generated by the city's increasing industrial activity and population density.; The second half of the dissertation focuses on the Revolutionary War and its continuing fallout for the medical establishment of Philadelphia, and for how Philadelphians in general conceived of themselves as a society, and of their place in an empire, a nation, and a global economy. Chapter 4, "A Soul Expanding for the Common Weal," reconstructs the transatlantic world of medical education in the eighteenth century, its shared goal of universal improvement, and how it was sundered by the events of the American Revolution. Chapter 5, "An Indissoluble Union," follows members of Philadelphia's medical establishment during the war years, to uncover how their experience of military medicine transformed their ideas about the proper role of a physician, and how the political alliances they forged during the war allowed them the political capital necessary to advance those ideas. Finally, Chapter 6, "A Matter of Police," investigates Philadelphia during the tumultuous 1790s, as residents grappled with devastating outbreaks of yellow fever, even as they struggled to define their place in a still nebulous nation. |
