Benjamin Rush | Biography

Benjamin Rush, Physician, scientist, educator, and essayist, was born in Byberry Township near Philadelphia, the son of Susanna Hall Harvey and her second husband, John Rush, a gunsmith and farmer. Rush graduated from the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1760. From February 1761 to July 1766, he served in Philadelphia as an apprentice to Dr. John Shippen, a distinguished physician. In August of 1766 he left for Edinburgh University, where he received his M.D. in 1768. He continued his studies in London before returning to America in 1769, whereupon the trustees of the College of Philadelphia appointed him the first professor of chemistry. He later served as professor of medicine and clinical practice at the University of Pennsylvania. Perhaps the most influential physician in America, Rush devoted his life to teaching medicine, attending patients, and participating actively in the political and cultural life of the early republic.

To Rush, the study of medicine aimed not only at improving health but at establishing guidelines for the ordering and preserving of the American republic. Cleanliness, exercise, and moderation in drink and diet, the physician believed, would help maintain the virtue of all citizens. Contemporaries appreciated him as a prolific contributor to literary magazines such as the American Museum and Columbian Magazine, in which he published both scientific papers and social commentaries. His medical essays ranged in subject from treatises on smallpox inoculation and the causes of tetanus to inquiries on the effects of "spiritous liquors" and old age. These papers, often delivered orally, published in magazines and sometimes as separate pamphlets, were finally revised and collected in a series of volumes entitled Medical Inquiries and Observations (1789-1798).

In one of his most controversial pamphlets, An Account of the Bilious Remitting Yellow Fever, as it Appeared in the City of Philadelphia in the Year 1793 (1794), Rush defended his belief that yellow fever was of domestic origin and that bloodletting, a common eighteenth-century practice, was the preferred treatment. Many people heaped abuse upon the physician for not agreeing that the disease must have come from abroad, and for failing to stem the death toll. While many of those who could afford it fled to the safety of the countryside, Rush remained in Philadelphia throughout the epidemic. Of Rush's medical writings, his Medical Inquiries and Observations, Upon the Diseases of the Mind (1812) stands as his most important. Published in the year before his death, this volume offered one of the first studies of the causes and treatment of mental illness in America.

As a member of the American Philosophical Society and the society for Promoting Political Enquiries, Rush was at the center of a cohort devoted to advancing the arts and sciences in America; this group also included Benjamin Franklin, David Rittenhouse, and Charles Willson Peale. Rush was deeply committed to improving literary style in America and once remarked in a letter that "the present is an age of simplicity in writing in America. The turgid style of Johnson, the purple glare of Gibbon, and even the studied and thickset metaphors of Junius are all equally unnatural, and should not be admitted into our country." Rush's own style was clear, logical, and purposeful. He eschewed the use of Greek and Latin, developed his arguments point by point, and devoted his work to the creation of a perfect Christian Republic.

As with his medical and scientific papers, Rush's other writings were often presented orally, published in magazines, and printed as pamphlets. Many of these were later collected and revised in Essays, Literary, Moral & Philosophical (1798, enlarged 1806). These essays ranged from thoughts on slaveholding, female education, and public schools to enthnological studies of Indians and considerations on public punishments and the death penalty. Many of his essays generated discussion and contributed to changes in society. His commitment to education, for example, helped lead to the 1783 founding of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Rush's opposition to capital punishment, to take another case, influenced the passage of a 1794 law that abolished the death penalty in Pennsylvania except for murder in the first degree. Upon Rush's death, John Adams wrote Thomas Jefferson that he knew of "no Character living or dead, who has done more real good in America."

Rush played a role in some of the most important writings to emerge from the Revolutionary and early national period. The young physician was deeply involved in Revolutionary politics in Philadelphia. It was Rush who suggested to Thomas Paine that he title his pamphlet Common Sense rather than "Plain Truth." Two days after the publication of Paine's powerful plea for separation from Great Britain, Rush married sixteen-year-old Julia Stockton, daughter of Richard Stockton. In June 1776, Rush was elected to the Continental Congress; both he and his father-in-law signed the Declaration of Independence. During the Revolutionary War, Rush served as Physician General of the Middle Department. Rush also labored to reconcile the strained friendship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and after four years of cajoling he succeeded in 1812. The resulting correspondence between the two former presidents, which was not published in its entirety until 1959, forms one of the most enlightening contributions in the history of American letters.

Rush's literary reputation today rests chiefly on writings that were not published in his lifetime: his autobiography, Travels Through Life, a commonplace book he maintained from 1789-1813, and two volumes of his letters. The autobiography, written in 1800 for his children and never intended for publication, was undertaken in part to vindicate himself from the criticism he received during the yellow fever epidemics of 1793 and 1797. Together, the autobiography, commonplace book, and correspondence provide a fascinating portrait of Rush's life as a physician in Philadelphia and illuminate American politics, society, and culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.