RUSHBenjamin (1745-1813), the Sydenham of America, was born near Bristol (12 miles from Philadelphia), on a homestead founded by his grandfather, who had followed Penn from England in 1683, being of the Quaker persuasion, and a gunsmith by trade. After a careful education at school and college, and an apprenticeship of six years with a doctor in Philadelphia, Rush went for two years to Edinburgh, where he attached himself chiefly to Cullen. He took his M.D. degree there in 1768, spent a year more in the hospitals of London and Paris, and began practice in Philadelphia at the age of twenty-four, undertaking at the same time the chemistry class at the new medical school. He at once became a leading spirit in the political and social movements of the day. He was a friend of Franklin’s, 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 Laws, “Sermons to the Rich,” and on Negro Slavery, having taken up the last-named subject at the instance of Anthony Benezet, whose Historical Account of Guinea was the inspiration of Clarkson’s celebrated college essay twelve years after. In 1774 he started along with James Pemberton the first anti-slavery society in America, and was its secretary for many years. When the political crisis ended in 1787 with the convention for drawing up a federal constitution, of which he was a member, he retired from public life, and gave himself up wholly to medical practice. In 1789 he exchanged his chemistry lectureship 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 medicine and of clinical practice, succeeding in 1805 to the chair of the theory and practice of physic. He was the central figure in the medical world of Philadelphia, as Cullen was at Edinburgh and Boerhaave at Leyden. Much of his influence and success was due to his method and regularity of life on the Franklin model. During the thirty years that he attended the Pennsylvania Hospital as physician, he is said to have never missed his daily visit and never to have been more than ten minutes late. Notwithstanding a weak chest, which troubled him the greater part of his life, he got through an enormous amount of work, literary and other; he was a systematic early riser, and his leisure at the end of the day was spent in reading poetry, history, the moral sciences, and the like, with his pen always in his hand. His temperament was of the gentle sort, and his conversation and correspondence abounding in ideas. It is stated by his friend Dr Hosack of New York, that Rush was successively a Quaker, an Anabaptist, a Presbyterian, and an Anglican. He gained great credit when the yellow fever devastated Philadelphia, in 1793, by his assiduity in visiting the sick (as many as one hundred and twenty in a day), and by his bold and apparently successful treatment of the disease by bloodletting. When he began to prosper in practice, he gave a seventh part of his income in charity. He died in 1813, after a five days’ illness from typhus fever. Nine out of a family of thirteen children survived him, all prosperously settled.

Rush’s writings cover an immense range of subjects, including language, the study of Latin and Greek, the moral faculty, capital punishment, medicine among the American Indians, maple sugar, the blackness of the negro, the cause of animal life, tobacco smoking, spirit drinking, as well as a long list of more strictly professional topics. His last work was an elaborate treatise on the Diseases of the Mind (1812). He is best known now by the five volumes of Medical Inquiries and Observations, which he brought out at intervals from 1789 to 1798 (two later editions revised by the author). Epidemiology, and yellow fever in particular, was the subject on which he wrote to most purpose. His treatment of yellow fever by bloodletting helped more than anything else to make him famous, although the practice would now be condemned. His views as to the origin and diffusion of yellow fever have a more permanent interest. He stoutly maintained, as against the doctrine of importation from the West Indies, that the yellow fever of Philadelphia was generated on the spot by noxious exhalations, although he does not appear to have suspected that there was something special or specific in the filthy conditions of soil or harbour mud which gave rise to the miasmata. For a number of years he expressed the opinion that yellow fever might become catching from person to person, under certain aggravated circumstances; but in the end he professed the doctrine of absolute non-contagiousness. He became well known in Europe as an authority on the epidemics of fever, and was elected an honorary member of several foreign societies.

See eulogy by IIosack {Essays, i., New York, 1824), with biographical details taken from a letter of Rush to President John Adams; also references in the works of Thacker, Gross, and Bowditch on the history of medicine in America. His part in the yellow fever controversies is indicated by La Roche {Yellow Fever in Philadelphia from 1699 to 185l,, 2 vols., Philadelphia, 1855) and by Bancroft {Essay on the Iellow Fever, London, 1811). His services as an abolitionist pioneer are recorded in Clarkson's History of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade.

Rushworth’s Historical Collections of Private Passages of Stats, IVeighty Matters in Law, and Remarkable Proceedings in Parliament was reprinted in eight folio volumes in 1721. The eighth volume of this edition is an account of the trial of the earl of Strafford, the other seven volumes being concerned with the miscellaneous transactions of the period from 1618 to 1648. Only the first three volumes and the trial of Strafford were originally published in Rushworth’s lifetime; but the manuscript of the other volumes was left by him ready for the press. The extreme value of the work is well known to all inquirers into the history of the Civil War, and much of the information it contains is to be found nowhere else. Its impartiality, however, can hardly be seriously maintained, and hence it is necessary to consult it with some caution.