Benjamin Rush (114)

Elected to the American Society.

Curator of the APS (1770-1773), secretary of the APS (1773-1779), vice-president of the APS (1797-1801)

Benjamin Rush (4 January 1746–19 April 1813) was a physician, professor, and reformer, and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his 1768 election to the American Society. Born to a modest family outside Philadelphia, his early studies were at the academy of his uncle, the New Light Presbyterian Dr. Samuel Finley, who was an original trustee of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton). Rush graduated from the same in 1760 and began a medical apprenticeship with APS Member Dr. John Redman, before leaving to study at Edinburgh with APS Member Dr. William Cullen in 1766, where Rush took a doctorate of his own two years later. He returned to profess Chemistry at the new medical school of the College of Philadelphia in 1769. His medical practice swelled, and by 1776 he charged would-be apprentices 100 guineas.
This expertise in chemistry and medicine led to multiple wartime appointments. He superintended a saltpeter factory in 1775. His July 20, 1776 election to the Continental Congress led to his being a Declaration of Independence signer (despite not being present at the vote); he became a staunch American nationalist, both in the debate on the Articles of Confederation (1777) and the ratification debates surrounding the more powerful federal government of the Constitution (1787). In 1777 he became the surgeon-general of the Middle Department of the army, becoming soon after the physician-general of its hospital. But Rush disapproved of the leadership of APS Member Director-General Dr. William Shippen, Jr., perhaps owing to the deplorable conditions and lacking reforms. Washington’s repeated defeats colored these frustrations. Rush believed Horatio Gates, victor at Saratoga, ought to lead the Army, and went so far as to say so in an anonymous letter to Patrick Henry, then Governor of Virginia. Henry passed on the letter and Washington recognized the disloyal hand. Shunned, overmatched, and dispirited, Rush resigned from the Army in early 1778. With teacher and friend, APS Member Dr. John Morgan, Rush built a case against Shippen that eventually led to Shippen’s court-martial and resignation.

Rush nursed his wounds from the experience by throwing himself into medical practice and teaching. He became the leading public intellectual in the field: he offered the first American edition of his mentor’s widely reprinted textbook in 1781, before beginning a prodigious pamphlet-writing campaign, which came to collection in his multi-volume Medical Inquiries and Observations. After his appointment to the Pennsylvania Hospital ward for the insane (1783), he medicalized mental illness (versus spiritual possession) and reported his findings and treatments in a widely reprinted work; these experiences reappear, with a thicker coat of philosophy, in a 1786 Society oration on the relationship between the physical causes of morality. He founded and consulted for the Philadelphia Dispensary of the Medical Relief of the Poor (1786), which served ever-increasing numbers year-over-year. Most memorably, Rush was the first to recognize the yellow fever outbreak of 1793. It demonstrated the limits of known medical science but also Rush’s indefatigability. Purgatives and bleedings were his treatment: patients who lived owed it to the treatments; those who did not, had not been treated enough. Whatever baneful effect such an approach had—Rush was roundly criticized by other physicians, and had little data to rebut the attacks—his tirelessness in treating some fifty to one-hundred patients per day transformed him into a popular hero.

Rush joined or supported nearly every reform, benevolence, and educational effort of note. He advocated temperate self-care: cider and beer (versus spirits), healthful dietary choices, and regular exercise. He held office with the Humane Society (1780) to prevent drownings and accidents. He donated to the Pennsylvania Hospital, the Silk Society, the College of Philadelphia, and volunteered physician services for the Society for Inoculating the Poor as well as the Prison Society. He was principal founder of Dickinson College, patron of Franklin College, and a lecturer to the Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia. He helped found the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 1787. His relationship with race and slavery was sometimes quixotic and deeply contradictory. He penned an antislavery tract in 1773 and was a founding member of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, later serving as the Abolition Society’s secretary and its president after 1803. He also presented a 1797 paper to the APS musing that leprosy might be the cause of blackness; a cure would render all white, destroy race slavery, and fulfill Christian revelation. And in his Essays, Literary, Moral & Philosophical, he relates a dream: he travels to slave heaven, where they recount the brutal sins of their masters; the only whites are he and Anthony Benezet. But Rush also purchased a child named William Grubber sometime between 1775–76 and held him in bondage until 1793—at the same time he agitated for abolition. As it sometimes did, evidence of genuine affection between Billy and Benjamin peppers the record.[1]
Rush was an enthusiastic APS Member, serving as a Curator of the APS (1770-1773), Secretary (1773-1779), and Vice-president (1797-1801), but also on multiple committees, ranging from the standing Committee on Natural History and Chemistry to one tasked with designing a seal for the Society in 1770. His eulogy of APS President David Rittenhouse in 1796 became a central institutional memory. He was also elected to a variety of other societies: Massachusetts Medical Society (1787), the Medical Society of South Carolina (1795), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston, the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, the Royal Society of Arts of London, and the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. He died after a short illness in 1813 and was buried at Christ Church. (PI, ANB, DNB)

For more on Rush and Grubber, see Stephen Fried, Rush: Revolution, Madness, and the Visionary Doctor who Became a Founding Father (New York: Crown, 2018), 290–91, 317, 346, 395; Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 306n13.