Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Benjamin Rush
During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.
Editor’s Note: Stephen Fried is a journalist and bestselling historian.
Rush was a visionary writer and reformer, confidant to John Adams, Washington's surgeon general, and opponent of slavery and prejudice - and yet a lesser-known Founding Father.
Excerpted from the George Washington Book Prize finalist Rush: Revolution, M
“ To spend and be spent for the Good of Mankind is what I chiefly aim at ”
One of Benjamin Rush’s biographers has compared him to quicksilver, the brilliant and elusive element mercury that changes so unpredictably yet so curiously reflects the images around it.
William Maclay, elected by the Pennsylvania Legislature to the Senate of the United States, left his farm near Harrisburg early in March, 1789, and journeyed to New York to attend the first session of the First Congress.
Common Sense was a bestseller and turned the tide of public feeling toward independence, but for its author fame was followed by ingratitude.
The whole history of America affords examples of men who fitted precisely the needs of a particular moment, only to be cast aside, forgotten or traduced when the tide of events they created or manipulated waned and time passed them by.
OR DON’T PUT OFF UNTIL TOMORROW WHAT YOU CAN RAM THROUGH TODAY
Dr. Benjamin Rush believed the hand of God must have been involved in the noble work.
Medicine was primitive and their knowledge of it limited, but in their hazardous journey to the Pacific, Lewis and Clark lost only one patient
Yellow fever killed 4,000 in Philadelphia in 1793, and puzzled doctors ignored the real clue to blame “miasmata” in the air.
Late in the evening of August 21, 1793, Dr. Benjamin Rush, Philadelphia’s most prominent physician, sat down “much fatigued” to write to his wife to inform her that a “malignant lever” had broken out on the city’s water front.
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