Creating a City of Medicine

Yellow fever "just slams into Philadelphia in the summer of 1793," curator Sara Ray told 6abc, and "10% of the city died within a couple of months." The outbreak split the city's physicians and set off a mutual aid response, and that is where the show starts.

You walk into the Norris Gallery and move forward in time through five sections: the epidemic, the Medical Marketplace (most people were treated at home, since hospitals meant "death and poverty"), a City of Medical Education, Medicine in Wartime, and the germ revolution of the 1880s. Benjamin Rush shares the room with Richard Allen, Absalom Jones and the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, the world's first degree-granting women's medical school.

It's instruments, teaching models and old books from the College's collections, not specimens. Entry is included with a Mütter ticket ($25 adults), and medical, nursing and public health students get $15 off with code MEDSTUDY250.