144 “IN UTTER FEARLESSNESS OF THE REIGNING DISEASE” Literature and Medicine 35, no. 1 (Spring 2017) 144–166 © 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press “In Utter Fearlessness of the Reigning Disease”: Imagined Immunities and the Outbreak Narratives of Charles Brockden Brown Nicholas E. Miller In the fall of 1798, having noted that a “fatal pest has encompassed us and entered our own doors,” aspiring novelist Charles Brockden Brown lost his close friend—the poet and physician Elihu Hubbard Smith—to a growing yellow fever epidemic in New York. A similar outbreak had plagued the city only three years prior, and the most devastating of these epidemics had driven Brown from his Philadelphia home in 1793. Having arranged for the burial of his friend, he departed from this “pestilential, desolate, and sultry city” and took up residence with the playwright William Dunlap in New Jersey. A month later, he began writing Ormond; or, The Secret Witness. 1 A sprawling narrative of conspiracy and contagion, Ormond was the frst of Brown’s published novels to revisit the Philadelphia he knew in 1793: a community threat- ened not only by disease, but by the perceived collapse of established social, political, and racial hierarchies. By this time, Brown had spent three years working on Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793, and he published both novels in 1799 as violent democratic revolu- tions in France and Saint Domingue prompted citizens to contemplate how societies were bound together. As pestilent disease, uncontrolled immigration, and revolutionary energies threatened the capital of the young republic, the increased mobility—and, importantly, the perceived immunities—of foreign agents in Philadelphia led to fears that the na- tion was becoming susceptible to physical and ideational contagion.