Today’s Almanac-April 14, 2010
On April 14, 1775 Dr. Benjamin Rush became one of the leading founders of the first American Anti-Slavery Society. Rush, already the colonies’ most celebrated and respected physician just nine years after returning from the study of Medicine in Glasgow and London, seemed to be everywhere, do everything, and know everybody in the Revolutionary Era and the Early Republic. That same year he was a Delegate to the Continental Congress from Pennsylvania. In 1776 he signed the Declaration of Independence and became the lifelong friend of and correspondent with both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. He went into the field as a volunteer with the Continental Army medical service and was elevated to Surgeon General of the Middle Department. But conditions in what passed as Army hospitals appalled him, as did the poor training of most surgeons and the corruption of suppliers. His petitions to Congress and commanding General George Washington not only went unanswered, but Washington fired him for insubordination. Undeterred, Rush went home to Philadelphia and busied himself with endless reform projects, educational reforms, and medical innovations. In 1787 with his collaborator James Wilson, he rallied support for ratification of the Federal Constitution in Pennsylvania. Two years later he successfully campaigned for a new Constitution for Pennsylvania, which was a radically democratic document with universal male suffrage and other reforms that put it far in advance of other states. The practice of his medical profession was a mixed bag, but understandable in the pre-germ theory era of medicine. Rush was a major advocate of “bleed and purge” as a near panacea for most illness. His rigorous application of those cures during his universally admired and heroic service during the Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1783 probably led to more deaths than needed. But his refusal to abandon the city like virtually every other physician and his tireless personal care for the suffering won him universal admiration, and his book of his experiences published the following year made him as celebrated in Europe as in America. But Rush also advocated diagnosis based on carefully observed symptoms and was a rare advocate of preventative medicine. He also believed that medical care should not be a privilege for the wealthy and established the first free dispensary in the country in 1786. He promoted the use of vaccines and particularly worked to overcome suspicion of Small Pox vaccinations. He is most renowned for treating mental illness as a disease, not the possession of demons or common criminality. He abhorred the conditions under which the “insane” were held in at the Pennsylvania Hospital and successfully lobbied for the creation of a separate mental ward where the patients could be treated humanely. Although he applied bleeding to his mental patients, like all of his others, he also talked with them extensively and drew them out on past experiences that may have contributed to their disorder. For this he is widely hailed today as the Father of American Psychiatry. His book Inquiries and Observations, Upon the Diseases of the Mind, published in 1812 was the standard reference on the subject for most of the 19th Century. He became Professor of Medical Theory and Clinical Practice at the University of Pennsylvania 1791 and continued teaching until his death. By the end of his life he was credited with having trained more than half of the college educated physicians in the country. He also found time to found an independent liberal arts college, Dickenson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, in the tradition of his friend and fellow Renaissance man, Benjamin Franklin, he also lent his hand to all kinds of civic improvement projects and organizations for social reform. A short and incomplete list of the reforms he championed in addition to the abolition of slavery were prison reform and the abolition of the death penalty, public education for women, abstinence from alcohol and tobacco, conservation of natural recourses particularly clean water, and the proposal to establish a Department of Peace in the Federal Cabinet. Jefferson called on him to advise Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery on the treatment of diseases they might encounter and he provided them with a handy medical kit that contained 50 dozen of his laxative “purgatives” containing each containing 50% mercury. The pills didn’t kill the often constipated men, but deposits of poisonous mercury helped historians definitely identify their route and camp sites. Rush was raised a conventional Presbyterian and early influenced by the evangelical fervor of the Great Awakening sweeping the country. Yet his medical training and close association with Deists like Jefferson made the maintenance orthodoxy a difficult struggle for him. When he heard the preaching of Elhanan Winchester, a pioneer exponent of Universal Salvation, he became a convinced universalist. Although he attended many churches, he worshiped most steadily at Winchester’s Universal Baptist Church, the first explicitly universalist congregation in America. He helped organize the first Universalist Conference in 1800 and became the friend and correspondent of John Murray, the Father of American Universalism and his accomplished wife, the proto-feminist Judith Sargent Murray. In 1784 Rush welcomed the great English chemist and Unitarian Preacher Joseph Priestly to Philadelphia and helped him find a pulpit from which to preach at Winchester’s church. Latter he helped buy the land in Northumberland where Priestly’s family built their home and a chapel for Unitarian worship. He was almost the only man with whom Jefferson felt comfortable sharing his religious views. Believing that the Bible should be widely read but interpreted through the eye of reason, Rush founded a Bible Society later incorporated into The American Bible Society which has published and spread scripture ever since. As a philanthropist he often aided fledgling churches of various denominations. He helped secure a note on the land for Richard Allen’s first African Methodist Episcopal Church. One of Rush’s great contributions to American letters came when he coaxed his two old friends Jefferson and Adams, long bitterly estranged over politics, to re-establish communications through the mails. Rush had to carefully tend the fragile new relationship in its beginning, but it grew into an astonishing correspondence that continued until both men’s death on July 4, 1826. Rush died suddenly in 1813 at the age of 67 after a full and illustrious life. John Adams in a letter to Jefferson said it best, “…a better man than Rush could not have left us, more benevolent, more learned, of finer genius, or more honest. I know of no Character living or dead, who has done more real good in America.”