Benjamin Rush

Benjamin Rush was born in Byberry, twelve miles from Philadelphia. His father died when Benjamin was not yet six years old, and when he was eight his mother placed the boy in care of his maternal uncle, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Finley. Finley saw to Benjamin’s early education, and, in 1759, he was enrolled in the College of New Jersey [later Princeton University]. He graduated in 1760 with a Bachelor of Arts degree and for the next five years was apprenticed to Dr. John Redman in Philadelphia. Redman encouraged Rush to further his medical training at the University of Edinburgh, and it was there, in 1768, that Benjamin Rush received his M.D. degree. Rush must have had an ear for language, because, when he returned from a tour of Europe in 1769, he was fluent in French, Italian, and Spanish.

Rush set up his medical practice in Philadelphia and became a professor of chemistry at his old alma mater, the College of Philadelphia, now the University of Pennsylvania. He was well-liked in the city, in large part because of his medical care of the poor. His popularity extended to his classroom teaching, and, ultimately, he would publish the first American textbook in chemistry.

Despite his popularity, Rush was not without his flaws; he was a gossip and often judgmental of others. He was overly confident of the correctness of his own opinions and often unscientific in practice. He relied heavily on bleeding his patients, believing it was a cure for almost any ailment. When others abandoned the practice of bleeding, he refused to give it up. In 1793, as yellow fever raged throughout Philadelphia, he relied on bloodletting despite the advice of French doctors who had used more effective treatments during the frequent outbreaks of the disease in the West Indies.

Rush’s political views were well established by the early 177 0s, when he joined the Sons of Liberty. Thomas Paine consulted with Rush during the writing of his influential book, and it is claimed that it was Rush who suggested its title Common Sense. By 1776, Rush was a member of Pennsylvania’s provincial conference which was charged with sending delegates to the Continental Congress; Rush himself was chosen to attend . Rush joined the Congress after it had voted for independence. Even so, he still signed the Declarat ion.

In 1811, Rush recalled the signing of the Declaration of Independence in a letter to fellow signer John Adams: “The pensive and awful silence which pervaded the house when we were called up, one after another, to the table of the President of Congress, to subscribe what was believed by many at that time to be our own death warrants. The silence and the gloom of the morning was interrupted I well recollect only for a moment by Colonel Benjamin Harrison of Virginia, who said to Elbridge Gerry at the table ‘I shall have a great advantage over you Mr. Gerry when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead.’”

Not surprisingly, Rush served on the Congress’s medical committee, but he also joined the Philadelphia militia during the battles for control of the city. He thus witnessed the horrors of war. He was with Washington at Trenton in December of 1776, and recorded the events of December 24th. “I spent a night at a farmhouse near to him [Washington] and the next morning passed near an hour with him in private. He appeared much depressed, and lamented the ragged and dissolving state of his army in affecting terms.”

The horrors of war became personal that November , when Rush’s father-in-law, Richard Stockton was taken prisoner by Loyalists, being dragged from his bed in the bitter cold of winter, dressed only in a nightshirt and breeches. He would spend five weeks locked in irons and starving before General Washington managed his release. Writing to his friend Richard Henry Lee while Stockton languished in prison, Rush declared that “every particle of my blood is electrified with revenge, and if justice cannot be done him in any other way, I declare I will, in defiance of the authority of Congress…drive the first rascally Tory I meet a hundred miles, barefooted, through the first deep snow that falls in our country.” Fortunately, Stockton was freed in January 1777.

While still in Congress, Rush took on the role as surgeon-general of the middle department of the Continental A rmy and did his best to diminish the deaths of fighting men from typhoid, yellow fever, and other deadly camp diseases. But his under-reporting of patient deaths and his failure to actually visit the hospitals under his command led to his resignation from the post in 1778.

Before resigning as surgeon general, Rush began to criticize Washington’s conduct of the war. He complained to Virginia Governor Patrick Henry about Washington’s alleged incompetence, comparing General Horatio Gates’s “well regulated” army with Washington’s undisciplined, mob-like force. Later, Rush regretted his attack on Washington; he praised the General in a letter to John Adams in 1812 and pleaded with Washington’s first biographers to remove his association with the stinging words against the General.

After independence was won, Rush supported the creation of a stronger central government than the Articles of Confederat ion provided. He issued an address supporting the proposed new constitution in 1787 and voted for its ratification at the Pennsylvania ratifying convention. He served as the treasurer of the U.S. M int from 1797 to 1813, but devoted much of his time to civic and educational projects. He embraced social reform causes like abolition, prison reform, and the end to capital punishment. After the Revolution, he advocated better education for women and helped found the Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia. Yet he did not give up his commitment to “heroic medicine,” and when the Lewis and Clark Expedient set out, he advised Meriwether Lewis to employ a medical kit that included emetics to induce vomiting, laxatives that contained mercury, and blood letting.

Rush is perhaps best remembered as the man who brought John Adams and Thomas Jefferson together after the bitter election of 1800 drove them apart. Although Adams had once described Benjamin Rush as “too much of a talker to be a deep thinker,” in the 19th century he praised him to Jefferson, writing that he “knew of no character living or dead, who has done more really good in America.”

Rush died at the age of 67 when he contracted typhus while treating patients during the typhus epidemic of 1813. His wife, Julia Stockton Rush, was buried beside him when she died in 1848.