IMAGINE A REAL LIFE ATTACK of an unknown epidemic that devours human life like a 28 Days or a Dawn of the Dead zombie movie. Philadelphia has the distinction of being the birthplace of Legionaires Disease, named for the unknown pneumonia-like disease that broke out during the Pennsylvania American Legion Convention at the Bellevue Straford Hotel in July 1976 during the Bicentennial celebration. The city was in a near panic over these sudden and inexplicable deaths, which months later had killed 31 people.

Now imagine how we would react today to a disease that would kill 150,000 of us in three months.

As July became August in the year 1793, Philadelphia was the capital of the United States of America when people started dying suddenly and horribly from a new disease. The most famous physician in the city, Dr. Benjamin Rush, would be the first to identify the epidemic as, "Bilious remitting Yellow Fever," a name referring to the ghastly jaundiced color so many victims experienced during the end phase of the disease, which frequently left victims dying in a pool of black vomit and and their own malodorous bodily waste. So hideous were these deathbed scenes that many relatives simply abandoned afflicted family members and fled the city in terror and shame.

Within a matter of weeks Philadelphia was a ghost town. Members of Congress were among the first to flee.

Five thousand people died in Philadelphia between August and November -- one tenth of the population, the equivalent of 150,000 people today. People feared being infected by strangers. No one knew what caused the disease (mosquitoes). Into this vortex of fear, cowardice and abandonment emerged a Committee of Twelve citizens, most of them trademen "from the middle walks of life" (barrelmakers, printers, merchants) and at least one future multi-millionaire (French born Stephen Girard) who along with Dr. Rush and free black religious leaders like Richard Allen and Absolom Jones, tended to the sick, dying and dead.

When President George Washington returned on horseback into the nation's capital city during the first week in November 1793 he found a suprisingly clean and orderly Philadelphia, a town that had survived a devastating, almost apocalyptic plague. This was a city that had given up on itself, from the top down, but it found its courage to survive and its will to do what must be done through the efforts of ordinary citizens who, from the bottom up, said no to fear, and yes to the future of the Philadelphia they loved. And let that always be a lesson to us living 215 years later.

Don't panic.