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BENJAMIN RUSH (1745–1813)

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Originally appearing in Volume V23, Page 857 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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BENJAMIN RUSH (1745–1813)  ,
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American physician, was born in Byberry township, near
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Philadelphia, on a
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homestead founded by his grandfather, a Quaker gunsmith, who had followed Penn from England in 1683 . In 176o he graduated at
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Princeton . After serving an apprenticeship of six years with a doctor in Philadelphia, he went for two years to
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Edinburgh, where he attached himself chiefly to William Cullen . He took his M.D. degree there in 1768, spent a
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year more in the hospitals of
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London and Paris, and began practice in Philadelphia at the age of twenty-four, undertaking at the same time the chemistry class at the Philadelphia medical college . He was a friend of Franklin, a member of Congress for the state of Pennsylvania in 1776, and one of those who signed the Declaration of Independence the same year . He had already written on the Test
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Laws, " Sermons to the Rich," and on negro
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slavery; and in 1774 he started along with James Pemberton the first anti-slavery society in
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America, and was its secretary for many years . In 1787 he was a member of the Pennsylvania convention which adopted the Federal constitution, and thereafter he retired from public
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life, and gave himself up wholly to medical practice . In 1789 he exchanged his chemistry lecture-
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ship for that of the theory and practice of physic; and when the medical college, which he had helped to found, was absorbed by the university of Pennsylvania in 1791 he became professor of the institutes of
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medicine and of clinical practice, succeeding in 1796 to the chair of the theory and practice of medicine . He gained
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great credit when the yellow fever devastated Philadelphia, in 1793, by his assiduity in visiting the sick, and by his bold and apparently successful treatment of the disease by bloodletting . He died in Philadelphia on the 19th of
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April 1813, after a five days' illness from typhus fever . His son Richard is separately noticed . Another son,- James (1786–1869), was a physician, and author of various books, such as Philosophy of the Human Voice (1827) and Analysis of the Human Intellect (1865) .

Benjamin Rush's writings covered an immense range of subjects, including language, the study of Latin and Greek, the moral faculty, capital punishment, medicine among the American Indians, maple
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sugar, the blackness of the negro, the cause of animal life,
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tobacco smoking, spirit drinking, as well as many more strictly professional topics . His last
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work was an elaborate
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treatise on the Diseases of the Mind (1812) . He is best known by the five volumes of Medical Inquiries and Observations, which he brought out at intervals from 1789 to 1798 (two later
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editions revised by the author) . See eulogy by his friend Dr David Hosack (Essays, i., New York, 1824), with
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biographical details taken from a letter of Rush to President John Adams; also references in the
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works of Thacker,
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Gross and Bowditch on the
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history of medicine in America . His
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part in the yellow fever controversies is indicated by La Roche (Yellow Fever in Philadelphia from 1699 to 1854, 2 vols., Philadelphia, 1855) and by Bancroft (Essay on the Yellow Fever, London, 1811) . His services as an abolitionist
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pioneer are recorded in Clarkson's History of the Abolition of the
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African Slave Trade .

End of Article: BENJAMIN RUSH (1745–1813)
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