Feverish Love

Abstract

In New York, Sarah and Joshua found their lives fluctuating wildly between joy and death, with death always seeming to win in the end. Although Sarah and her husband had been careful to inoculate their children against smallpox, there was no vaccine for yellow fever, which ravaged the city in 1819, 1821, and 1823. Yellow fever was one of the most dreaded diseases in early America: death rates were high, and the time between infection and death was short. One person who didn’t survive the plague years was Sarah’s mother. Yet mixed with the terror, there were blessings: Sarah gave birth to ten children in ten years, and, in 1823, her brother Isaac married Joshua Moses’s sister, Lavinia. Lavinia, too, would bring forth new life: a boy, then a girl. And while Sarah escaped the fevers, childbirth would claim both her and Lavinia between 1828 and 1829.