Fever 1793

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity. 

ACTIVITY: “Visions of Epidemics”

Writers are not the only artists who use their work to try to grapple with epidemics; visual artists, too, use their work to ask questions and convey ideas about the problem of epidemic disease.

Fever 1793 takes place in the late 1700s—but this was far from the only serious outbreak of yellow fever the world has faced. In the late 1800s, waves of this disease swept through several countries around the world. Use the links provided to look at two pieces of art that came out of yellow fever epidemics in the late 1800s.

•  Oil painting by Juan Manuel Blanes: Yellow Fever in Buenos Aires, 1871
• Sketch by unknown artist: Yellow Fever Burial, 1878

This activity has two parts; complete Part A before you start work on Part B.

Part A

Create a word cloud about each piece of art.

• Look carefully at the piece of art:
• What is happening in this picture?
• What does the artist seem to want to emphasize?
• What feelings and ideas are conveyed by the expressions on people’s faces, their body language, and their positions in the frame?
• What feelings and ideas are conveyed by things like color, lines, light, perspective, and so on?
• Choose an online word cloud generator that allows you to input text manually, choose fonts, and weight words.
• Add at least ten words that describe the piece of art. Choose words that literally describe elements of the picture as well as words that convey the same feelings and ideas as the picture conveys.
• Choose fonts for each word thoughtfully—Comic Sans is probably not appropriate, for instance.
• Weight words according to how important they seem.
• When you finish the two word clouds, download them both and paste them into a document.

Part B

Demonstrate which feelings and ideas Fever 1793 has in common with the two pieces of art.

• Create a T chart on the same document, below your two word clouds.
• On the left-hand side of your chart, list three key feelings and ideas from each piece of art (You will list six things in total on this side of the chart.)
• On the right-hand side, provide a quote from Fever 1793 that conveys a similar feeling or idea. Be sure to transcribe the quote accurately and cite the page number where you found the quote.

Teaching Suggestion: Use this activity to talk about which elements Fever 1793 emphasizes and the techniques writers use to convey emphasis and tone. You might have students debate which words they would include in a word cloud for the book if they were to make one for this text. Ask students to consider how a written work uses the passage of time to convey feelings and ideas in a way that a static piece, like the painting and sketch, cannot.

Paired Text Extension

How do depictions of events at the time they are happening compare with a story written centuries later, like Fever 1793? Read Chapter IV of A Short Account of the Malignant Fever Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia by Mathew Carey and then answer the following question:

• Is there anything that the pieces of art and Mathew Carey’s account have in common that is missing from—or is significantly different in—Fever 1793? Or did the author of this contemporary, fictional account manage to capture the same ideas and feelings present in the art and writing actually created during these yellow fever outbreaks?

Teaching Suggestion: Students will arrive at different answers to this question; use their differing viewpoints as a springboard to discuss what is important in a historical account. Depending on the sophistication of your students, consider a discussion of how a reader’s perspective in time affects their reading of sources, their understanding of “significance,” and the techniques used to appeal to them.