“A REFUTATION” Performance Spurs Discussion About Modern-Day Inequities for Caregivers and Patients

In February, Theater of War Productions staged two Greenwall-commissioned dramatic readings of A REFUTATION, a series of conflicting historical accounts of Philadelphia’s 1793 yellow fever epidemic with implications for America’s current health inequities. These performances marked the capstone celebration of the Foundation’s 75^th anniversary.

Around 400 people attended the performances in person at Ebenezer United Methodist Church-Capitol Hill and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, and more than 600 people watched online. The performances featured actors Chad Coleman and Michael Potts as two Philadelphia civic leaders, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, respectively; Brian F. O’Byrne as the Irish American publisher Matthew Carey; and Peter Marks as Benjamin Rush, one of America’s Founding Fathers and a physician and civic leader in Philadelphia.

The primary text for the readings comes from a pamphlet by Jones and Allen describing the Black community’s suffering and loss during the epidemic. They wrote the pamphlet to rebut a popular, short history of the epidemic by Carey that falsely asserted that Black nurses and other caregivers swindled and extorted their white patients.

At the time of the epidemic, there was a widely held but false belief that Black people were immune to yellow fever. Rush reached out to Jones and Allen as leaders of Philadelphia’s Black community, asking them to enlist the help of Black caregivers in nursing the sick and burying the dead. They agreed and organized a door-to-door response to the epidemic. Their pamphlet, the first publication by African American authors to be copyrighted in the U.S., describes in detail the suffering they witnessed and the efforts that Black community members made to help the sick, often to their own detriment, as they were not in fact immune to yellow fever. In many cases, they accepted little or no money for their services, yet many became sick themselves and some died.

The performance at Ebenezer United Methodist Church was followed by reflections from a panel comprising ministers, nurses, firefighters, and paramedics. They made connections between the experiences described by Jones and Allen to U.S. healthcare workers’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic and the experiences of modern-day Black caregivers.

 “You tend to not hear about the plight of nurses in…these stories, and you definitely don’t hear about the plight of Black nurses in a lot of historical contexts,” commented Katie Boston-Leary, Senior Vice President of Equity and Engagement at the American Nurses Association. “There’s still a feeling that Black people don’t feel pain as much as their white counterparts…A lot of this still exists today.”

The performance and panel spurred a lively discussion with the audience, surfacing themes of the effects of misinformation, the culture of service and its exploitation, and historical and contemporary racism in health care and medicine. You can watch the event in full in the video above or here.