Benjamin Rush

American physician and educator

• Born: January 4, 1746
• Birthplace: Byberry, Pennsylvania
• Died: April 19, 1813
• Place of death: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Although he is more likely to be remembered as a signer of the Declaration of Independence and an enthusiastic supporter of the U.S. Constitution, Rush also was a physician, the first professor of chemistry in North America, the first American to write a book on psychiatry, a tireless worker against slavery, and an advocate for modernized education, temperance, and prison reform.

Early Life

Benjamin Rush was the fourth child in a family of seven children. His father, John, a farmer and a gunsmith, died when Benjamin was five years old. As a result, his mother, Susanna (Hall) Harvey Rush, had to open a grocery store to support her family.

When Benjamin was eight years old, he entered a school operated by his uncle, the Reverend Mr. Samuel Finley, and it was there that the boy came into contact with the tenets of the Great Awakening, a movement that was stirring the inert religious energies of the colonies. Rush, who remained devoutly religious throughout his life, went to the College of New Jersey (founded the same year he was born, later to become Princeton University) fully expecting to emerge a minister like his uncle. Acting on the advice of others, he began to consider other career possibilities, however, and finally chose medicine.

After receiving his degree in 1760, Rush studied medicine as an apprentice under John Redman in Philadelphia, where he also attended medical lectures at the College of Philadelphia. In 1766, he enrolled in the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, where many other Americans had studied medicine. He received his medical degree in 1768, having concentrated on the study of chemistry. His dissertation, on the human digestive system, was the product of much experimentation on his own digestive system.

Following graduation, Rush spent some time visiting England and then returned to Philadelphia, where he began his own practice in 1769. In that same year he was appointed professor of chemistry at the College of Philadelphia, which today is the Medical College of the University of Pennsylvania. He was the first professor of chemistry in North America.

Life’s Work

Although the impact of the Great Awakening was always a part of his thinking, Benjamin Rush was also a man of the Enlightenment. Along with his friend Benjamin Franklin and other enlightened Americans, he was humanistic and optimistic, believing that natural philosophy was the key to expanding knowledge.

Unlike Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and others, however, Rush exhibited little in the way of brilliant or original thinking. He wrote the first chemistry text by an American-born individual (Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on Chemistry) in the second year of his teaching career, yet it contained no genuinely original work. He taught the importance of hypotheses in medical and scientific inquiry, but, strangely for a man of the Enlightenment (and very unlike Franklin or Jefferson), Rush eschewed experimentation that would test hypotheses. Finally, Rush became more and more convinced that all fevers were the result of arterial tension, and thus the only way to cure a fever was to relieve that tension through bloodletting. In his enthusiasm for the method, Rush was led to insist that in cases of severe fever, as much as four-fifths of a patient’s blood should be drained away. He was certainly not the only one to believe this erroneous view—indeed, for a long period bloodletting had been a universally accepted practice. Unhappily, as the most famous physician in the United States, Rush was in a position to influence, rightly or (in this instance) wrongly, countless other physicians of his own generation and of generations to come.

The year 1776 was an important year for Rush. In that year he married Julia Stockton, with whom he would have thirteen children (including James, who would follow in his father’s footsteps as a physician and medical educator). Also, he joined the Continental Congress and signed the Declaration of Independence. During the revolution, he served briefly as surgeon general to the Armies of the Middle Department, and he also served on a governmental committee that encouraged the local production of gunpowder. In this latter endeavor, his knowledge of chemistry came in handy, and his instructions for the manufacturing of saltpeter were widely circulated. Rush was also an early and enthusiastic supporter of the Constitution, a member of the convention that framed it, and a member of the Pennsylvania Convention that ratified it.

After the war, Rush resumed his teaching and his medical practice—a practice that originally had been mostly among the poor but now grew to encompass many of the most prominent of Philadelphia’s citizenry. In 1787, Rush took charge of the branch of the Pennsylvania Hospital that housed and treated the insane, and in this new position he showed a deep understanding of the problems of the mind—an understanding that resulted in his study Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind (1812), the first book on psychiatry written by an American.

In 1789, Rush surrendered his teaching post in chemistry to accept the position of professor of theory and practice of medicine at the College of Philadelphia. There, Rush began to refine his theories on bloodletting, which he put into vigorous practice during Philadelphia’s great yellow-fever epidemic of 1793. His example would, unfortunately, be followed by many physicians during yellow-fever epidemics for almost a century.

In 1791, Rush was appointed professor of institutes of medicine and clinical practice, and in 1796 he became professor of the theory and practice of medicine. He was at the height of his career, the most famous physician in the United States, and the inspiration of a whole generation of medical students, whom he served as both teacher and friend. In addition to his teaching and his medical practice, Rush was also very active in social and humanitarian work, opposing slavery and capital punishment while supporting improvements in education (especially for women), temperance, and prison reform.

In 1797, Rush accepted the position of treasurer at the U.S. Mint, an office he still held at the time of his death on April 19, 1813. He was sixty-seven years of age.

Significance

As an enlightened American, Benjamin Rush was a man of wide-ranging interests throughout his life. He was an ardent patriot, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a strong supporter of the Constitution, and influential among his revolutionary contemporaries. In addition, he took part in a movement to give his home state of Pennsylvania a new constitution in 1788.

His support of numerous social causes was always strong, and many of his views on the insane, slavery, and education were in advance of their time. As a teacher, Rush inspired and nurtured many hundreds of students throughout his long teaching career. As a physician, the most famous of his time, Rush unfortunately fell under the sway of theories that were often prejudicial to the health of his patients—theories that have been thoroughly discredited as medical knowledge has expanded.

Bibliography

Brodsky, Alyn. Benjamin Rush: Patriot and Physician. New York: Truman Talley Books, 2004. A sympathetic biography, describing Rush’s medical practice, political career, relationship with Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, and other aspects of his personal life and multifaceted career. Brodsky credits Rush with writing an essay that instigated the Boston Tea Party and with encouraging Thomas Paine to write Common Sense.

Goodman, Nathan G. Benjamin Rush: Physician and Citizen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1934. The first biography of Rush, portraying him in his many and varied roles as professor, practitioner, politician, and crusader for reform. Perhaps its most important contribution, however, is to reveal Rush as a pioneer practitioner in the field of psychiatry.

Hawke, David. Benjamin Rush: Revolutionary Gadfly. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971. An excellent biography of Rush, this study takes the story of his life up to 1790, at which time the author claims that Rush became politically inactive. Prior to that date, however, Rush was almost compulsively active in politics as well as social causes, medicine, and a score of other pursuits. The work reveals Rush in all of his frenetic activities and shows the numerous and baffling contradictions and paradoxes in his behavior. The amount of detail supplied is enormous, as Rush’s opinions on myriad subjects are carefully presented.

Powell, John H. Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia of 1793. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949. A popular, well-researched account of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, which depicts Rush as a courageous and well-meaning worker among the sick. The book is useful, too, for its account of the debate Rush conducted with other physicians of the city over the question of the contagiousness of yellow fever.

Rush, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush. Edited by George W. Corner. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1948. A collection of notebooks kept by Rush throughout his lifetime. The collection clearly reveals his personality and character as well as his views on the times in which he lived. The war between England and the American colonies, the medical practices of American Indians, the character of the French, and Philadelphia’s great yellow fever epidemic of 1793 are among the subjects discussed.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Letters of Benjamin Rush. Edited by Lyman H. Butterfield. 2 vols. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951. These volumes contain a wealth of information on Rush as a teacher and practitioner of medicine, as an essayist, as a political activist, and as a tireless worker for the abolition of slavery, the modernization of education, temperance, and prison reform.

Shryock, Richard Harrison. “The Medical Reputation of Benjamin Rush: Contrasted Over Two Centuries.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 45 (1971): 507-552. Considers the changing reputation of Rush as a physician. He was eulogized upon his death, but over time, however, physicians and historians came to realize the consequences of the “heroic” methods of bloodletting and purging practiced by Rush.

Weisberger, Bernard A. “The Paradoxical Doctor Benjamin Rush.” American Heritage 27 (1975): 40-47, 98-99. Presents Rush as a man of enormous contradictions in medicine and politics, who was often quarrelsome in the latter instance and usually wrongheaded in the former.