Yellow Fever

In a gray Veterans Day ceremony, the city yesterday turned over historic Washington Square to the custodianship of the National Park Service. Independence National Historical Park will now have responsibility for maintaining the six-acre square and will integrate it with other park attractions, such as Independence Hall, Carpenters Hall and the Liberty Bell. "The square will be better used, be better represented and will have better historic presentation now," said Robert C. Nix 3d, president of the Fairmount Park Commission.

TORONTO EX-PM SUES OVER CLAIMS OF KICKBACKS Irate at being linked to alleged kickbacks in an Airbus deal, former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney filed a $37 million lawsuit yesterday against the government and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The suit seeks the biggest libel award ever in Canada and is the first to be filed by a former prime minister against the government. Mulroney, head of a Progressive Conservative government from 1984 until 1993, was linked by the Justice Department to the alleged kickbacks from Air Canada's $1.8 billion purchase of 34 Airbus jetliners in 1988.

When the Revolutionary War hero didn't get paid for his efforts, he moved into a boarding house on Pine Street and tried to get the federal government to loosen its purse strings. That boarding house - now the Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial at 3rd and Pine streets - has been closed since Jan. 1. You guessed it. More than 200 years later, again there were no federal funds for Kosciuszko. The boarding house was one of seven historic buildings that were closed to more than 49,800 tourists who have visited Independence National Historical Park since January.

The folks who organized this week's national Conference on Black Philanthropy chose Philadelphia as the site because of the city's historic significance in the tradition of black philanthropy. That tradition has meant giving time and money, starting in and through the black church. In 1789, Rev. Richard Allen founded the Free African Society, the nation's first black mutual-aid society which provided mortgages, burial insurance, sick benefits and the like. During the yellow fever epidemic of 1793, society members risked their lives to tend the sick and bury the dead, both black and white.

William J. Snape, 85, longtime director of the Camden County Psychiatric Hospital and an author, died Sunday at Long Beach (Calif.) Memorial Medical Center. A resident of Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., since 1992, he previously was a longtime resident of Haddonfield. He was born in Camden, where he was a 1929 graduate of Camden High School. Dr. Snape studied gastroenterology - disorders of the digestive system - and in 1953 became one of the first board-certified gastroenterologists in New Jersey.

Police hunting for madman who butchered N.Y. therapist NEW YORK - Police were hunting last night for a man who entered a psychologist's office with a bag of knives and a meat cleaver and hacked her to death. A colleague who responded to the victim's screams was badly wounded, and investigators were trying to determine whether the attacker was a patient at the clinic. Three knives were recovered at the scene, including the cleaver, which was apparently bent from the attack, police said.

People who travel overseas on business to major cities such as London, Paris or Tokyo seldom consider the implications for their health. If you are headed to Malaysia, however, have you checked out the latest on the outbreak of febrile viral encephalitis? Do you know who should get a vaccination against hepatitis A no matter where they are traveling? Do you know which countries require you to have been vaccinated against yellow fever if you are arriving from certain other countries?

Dropping her voice down to a conspiratorial whisper, park ranger Helen McKenna-Uff leans forward and says, "Let us glance at the butchery itself. " And, of course, it is not a pretty sight, what with two women brutally murdered - one nearly decapitated and the other stuffed into a chimney. McKenna-Uff describes each gory detail - the clotted blood on the hank of human hair - with clinical detachment, but never without drama and passion. McKenna-Uff, tall and striking in her National Park Service ranger's outfit, has found her calling: sending chills up and down the spines of the relatively few summertime tourists who find their way to the Edgar Allan Poe Historic Site at Seventh and Spring Garden Streets in Northern Liberties.

After more than 200 years, one man was still wearing a gold wedding ring on his finger. A baby was wrapped in a blanket and wore a cap. And some bodies, including a man with red hair and beard, had flesh on their bones. All told, the remains of 15 people - four men, five women and six children - were recovered more than three years ago from a Philadelphia Water Department excavation along Washington Avenue near Eighth Street. They probably died, historians say, in a yellow fever epidemic in the 1790s, and were hurriedly buried in coffins, one on top of another, in a corner of what was then St. Joseph's Catholic Cemetery.

Even the best scientists and doctors get things wrong. The great physician Benjamin Rush tortured yellow-fever victims with a "treatment" that involved purging and flatulence. Charles Darwin made sexist statements that would get him drummed out of most universities. As Philadelphia launches a two-week celebration of science on Friday, a group of historians are planning their presentation of the bloopers and blunders, the dated and the discredited. Their program, called Seemed Right at the Time?