Benjamin Rush
Birthday	Friday, December 24, 1745
Birthplace	Byberry, Philadelphia County
Died	Monday, April 19, 1813
Occupation	Physician, writer, educator
Known for	Signer of the United States Declaration of Independence

Rush, Benjamin

(1745–1813) physician, Revolutionary patriot, educator; born in Byberry, Pa. After studying medicine in Philadelphia, he completed his studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland (1768). He set up his practice in Philadelphia and taught chemistry at the medical college there; in 1770 he published the first American chemistry text. He also wrote on social and political subjects, and as the American Revolution approached, he attached himself to the patriots; as a member of the Continental Congress, he signed the Declaration of Independence (1776). During the war, he served only a year as surgeon general of the middle department of the Continental army because he had a dispute with his superior (and former professor), Dr. William Shippen, and he was loosely linked to the Conway Cabal, accused of plotting to replace George Washington. He returned to his practice in Philadelphia but helped lead the fight for Pennsylvania to adopt the new U.S. Constitution; he would serve as the treasurer of the U.S. Mint (1797–1813). Meanwhile, he served on the staff of the Philadelphia Hospital (1783–1813) and would also teach at the University of Pennsylvania (1792–1813). He established the first free clinic in the U.S.A. (1786). He helped found the first antislavery society in the U.S.A. (1803), and was outspoken on other social issues, calling for an end to capital punishment, the reform of education and prisons, and the promotion of temperance. He was also forward-looking in his attitudes toward the treatment of mental illness; his Diseases of the Mind (1812) presaged some of the ideas of modern mental therapeutics. His ideas on the cause of diseases, however, became so exotic as to be dangerous—he believed that all diseases were caused by the "excitability" of blood vessels and could be cured by bloodletting. He published Medical Inquiries and Observations (1789–93) to promote this theory, and when Philadelphia suffered an epidemic of yellow fever in 1793, he put his theory into practice; unfortunately his patients continued to die. This did not stop him from publishing his theories again in An Account of the Bilious Remitting Yellow Fever.… (1794), in which he actually came closer to the truth when he indicated that unsanitary conditions had also played a role in the epidemic.

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References in periodicals archive

Benjamin Rush: The Founding Father Who Healed a Wounded Nation" is an extraordinary and deftly written biography that should be considered an essential and core addition to community and academic library American Biography collections.

Dr. Benjamin Rush

Benjamin Rush's view that a statewide or nationwide system of public schools could cluster children by faith under the tutelage of religious leaders at public expense had been an outlier.

The originalist case against vouchers: the First Amendment, religion, and American public education

In fact, Witherspoon was already highly regarded as a formidable polemicist and spokesman for Calvinist orthodoxy in 1766 when the young Benjamin Rush was deputed to lure him across the ocean to the College of New Jersey.

The forgotten founder: John Witherspoon

In The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush: His "Travels Through Life" Together with His "Commonplace Book for 1789-1812," edited by G.

Defining disease: the gold standard of disease versus the fiat standard of diagnosis

She is an American reformer and religious hero in the tradition of Benjamin Rush, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Innocence isn't everything

Stinchcomb includes the contributions of John Howard (who coined the term "penitentiary"), William Penn, Benjamin Rush and Alexander Maconochie, among others.

Corrections: Past, Present and Future

It's one of America's most fascinating cemeteries, thanks to its colonial residents and other tenants such as Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry, and Phillip Syng Physick, the father of modern surgery.

Pay your respects to the father of risk management: where American history and insurance history collide

In America, the concept of 'therapeutic horticulture' dates back to 1768, when Benjamin Rush considered that digging the soil had a curative effect on the mentally ill.

HEALTH: All about flower power; Looking after your garden can help you look after your health. John von Radowitz explains

Its American champions included prominent physician Benjamin Rush and "health reformers" such as J.

Going it alone

Benjamin Rush, M.D., signer of the Declaration of Independence and physician to George Washington, said, "Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship.

The politics of health care

Students at Benjamin Rush Elementary School in the Lake Washington School District walk through nearby wetlands, take digital pictures of plant species, transport them into their color-screened iPaq handheld computers, and sync the handhelds to a computer to research plants on the Internet.

Long term technology success: see how this Washington district keeps students excited while they incorporate computers into everyday learning. (district Profile)

We meet Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the father of American psychiatry (whose image is still on the seal of the American Psychiatric Association).

Ill-Treated: The continuing history of psychiatric abuses