Rush, Benjamin
Rush, Benjamin
Benjamin Rush (1746–1813), American physician, politician, and social reformer, was born in Byberry, Pennsylvania, the son of a farmer and gunsmith. After graduating from the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) in 1760, he was apprenticed to the physician John Redman. He entered the University of Edinburgh in August 1766 and received his medical degree in June 1768, after presenting a thesis, De coctione ciborum in ven-triculo, based on several experiments performed on himself and a friend. Shortly after his return to Philadelphia in 1769, Rush was elected professor of chemistry in the College of Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania) and began the practice of medicine.
Like his contemporaries Franklin and Jefferson, Rush was a representative of the American Enlightenment. As a republican, he was an ardent proponent of American independence. In 1776 he was made a member of the Continental Congress and signed the Declaration of Independence. He joined the Continental Army in December 1776 and from April 1777 to January 1778 served as surgeon-general of the armies of the Middle Department. But differences arose between Rush and William Shippen, the director-general, which led to Rush’s resignation and resumption of private practice in Philadelphia. In 1789 he was appointed professor of the theory and practice of medicine in the medical faculty of the College of Philadelphia.
At the same time Rush continued his social and political activities. He felt obliged to use his mind and pen in any way that would advance national unity and foster political stability in the young American republic. Thus, he advocated the national constitution of 1787 and helped to frame the Pennsylvania state constitution of 1790. From 1797 to 1813 he served as treasurer of the United States Mint. Moreover, recognizing the relationship between an informed public opinion and popular sovereignty, Rush saw the need to prepare the citizens for the task of governing. Consequently, he advocated a national system of education, with various state-supported schools, including a national university and technical schools. In addition, Rush also championed higher education for women, and he was largely responsible for the founding of Dickinson College in western Pennsylvania.
But Rush’s efforts for the public good went beyond education. His major impulsion to action arose from the desire to improve the conditions of men in a rational manner. He was an early and passionate proponent of the abolitionist cause, serving as president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. He advocated temperance and legal control of drinking. Penal reform was another cause that Rush made his own, and in 1787, together with Franklin and several like-minded men, he organized the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. It was this group that succeeded in having the death penalty in Pennsylvania abolished for all crimes except murder in the first degree. Rush was likewise a principal founder, in 1786, of the Philadelphia Dispensary for the Poor, the first free dispensary in the United States.
As a physician, Rush, like so many of his medical contemporaries, is a characteristic figure of the transitional period during which modern medicine was just beginning to emerge. Medical practice was based on empiricism, tradition, and theories that lacked any firm scientific foundation. Moreover, like other physicians of his time, Rush supported his opinion and practice by argument rather than experiment.
Rush’s most significant contribution to medicine and to social welfare was his study of mental illness. In 1812 he published Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind, the first American treatise on mental illness. It remained the only American work of its kind for more than fifty years after its publication. Basing his treatise on observations made at the Pennsylvania Hospital, where he was in charge of mental patients for some thirty years, Rush attempted to provide a systematic account of mental disorders in terms of theory and practice. He viewed mental derangement as basically due to disease of the cerebral arteries, and his therapy was intended to relieve this pathology. Treatment was designed to affect the circulation of the blood and included purges, emetics, bleeding, a bland diet, and hot and cold showers. At the same time, Rush was aware of psychic components in mental illness and urged the patients to write down what troubled their minds and to read what they had written. It is clear that he was aware of the ill effects of repressed emotions. Rush was humane to his mental patients, but he recommended coercion under some circumstances and even advocated corporal punishment in extreme situations. Like his contemporary Philippe Pinel, Rush knew the importance of enlightened hospital management in dealing with mental patients. It was due to his efforts that a separate wing for the insane was added at the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1796. Rush likewise recognized the need for well-qualified persons to serve as attendants in establishments for the mentally ill, as well as the necessity of keeping the patients and their quarters as neat and clean as possible. He also advocated occupational therapy; the separation of those patients who were disoriented and violent from the others; the provision of exercise and recreation for the patients; and the treating of the mentally ill with respect and kindness.
Rush exerted a significant influence on the practitioners of his time and for several generations after his death. His most important achievement was his pioneer endeavor to raise the study and treatment of the mentally ill to a systematic, scientific level.
George Rosen
[See alsoPsychiatry, article onChild Psychiatry; and the biography ofPinel.]
WORKS BY RUSH
1768 De coctione ciborum in ventriculo. Edinburgh: Bal-four.
(1786) 1839 Inquiry Into the Influence of Physical Causes Upon the Moral Faculty. Philadelphia: Cist. ? Delivered before the American Philosophical Society, February 27, 1786.
(1812) 1930 Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind. 4th ed. Philadelphia: Grigg.
The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush. Edited with an introduction and notes by George W. Corner. Princeton Univ. Press, 1948.
The Letters of Benjamin Rush. Edited by L. H. Butterfield. 2 vols. Princeton Univ. Press, 1951.
The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush. Edited by Dago-bert D. Runes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1947.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Binger, Carl 1966 Revolutionary Doctor: Benjamin Rush. New York: Norton.
Dain, Norman 1964 Concepts of Insanity in the United States: 1789–1865. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press. ? See especially pages 15-25.
Deutsch, Albert (1937) 1949 Benjamin Rush: The Father of American Psychiatry. Pages 72-87 in Albert Deutsch, The Mentally 111 in America. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
Goodman, Nathan G. 1934 Benjamin Rush: Physician and Citizen, 1746–1813. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
Lloyd, James H. 1930 Benjamin Rush and His Critics. Annals of Medical History 2:470-475.
Pepper, O. H. Perry 1946 Benjamin Rush’s Theories on Bloodletting After One Hundred and Fifty Years. College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Transactions and Studies Fourth Series 14:121-126.
Rosen, George 1952 Political Order and Human Health in Jeffersonian Thought. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 26:32-44.
Shryock, Richard H. 1945 The Psychiatry of Benjamin Rush. American Journal of Psychiatry 101:429-432.
Shryock, Richard H. 1946 Benjamin Rush From the Perspective of the Twentieth Century. College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Transactions and Studies Fourth Series 14:113-120.
Wittels, Fritz 1946 Contribution of Benjamin Rush to Psychiatry. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 20:157-166.