BENJAMIN Rush died in April 1813, twenty-three years after Benjamin Franklin. He had outlived his mentor by almost exactly the same span that he had known him. In his final years he wrote his Autobiography — a remarkable document of self-accounting and self-justification — and continued to see patients and write letters until nearly the end. His correspondence across forty years fills two volumes in L.H. Butterfield's edition (Letters of Benjamin Rush, 1951); his published works fill a substantial shelf. He had been right about some things (the non-contagiousness of yellow fever, the disease model of alcoholism, the reformability of criminals) and wrong about others (the depletion protocol for fever, the specifics of his mental illness taxonomy). He had been certain about all of them.
The collection documented in this catalog is the material record of that certainty and its consequences: the books Rush read and owned, the institutions he helped build, the pamphlets he published, the legal battles he fought, the students he trained, and the letters he wrote from a sickbed, still arguing, refusing to cede a patient to a physician whose methods were directly opposed to his own.
Franklin appears in this collection as the origin point of that certainty: the man who wrote the introduction that opened Edinburgh's doors, who provided the example of the civic-minded intellectual using every available instrument — the press, the learned society, the philanthropic institution, the political maneuver — in the service of the public good. Rush followed that example in medicine, in abolitionism, in penal reform, in temperance, and in the long yellow fever controversy that was the greatest crisis of his career.
The relationship between a mentor and a physician, documented in these books and manuscripts and institutional records across nearly a century of American history, is the collection's organizing argument. Everything in it is a consequence of the letter Franklin wrote in 1766.
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For Further Reading
The following works are essential companions to the primary sources documented in this catalog:
Benjamin Rush: Biography and Letters
Brodsky, Alyn.
Benjamin Rush: Patriot and Physician. New York: Truman Talley Books, 2004. The most reliable modern biography; stronger on Rush's medical theory than Fried.
Fried, Stephen.
Rush: Revolution, Madness & the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father. New York: Crown, 2018. The most comprehensive modern biography; consult Brodsky for verification of disputed points.
Rush, Benjamin.
The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush. Edited by George W. Corner. Princeton: American Philosophical Society, 1948. The indispensable primary source.
Butterfield, L.H., ed.
Letters of Benjamin Rush. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951. The essential correspondence; the starting point for any serious engagement with Rush's thought.
Goodman, Nathan.
Benjamin Rush: Physician and Citizen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1934. Older but reliable on the medical career.
Benjamin Franklin
Isaacson, Walter.
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. The best modern biography for general readers.
Wood, Gordon S.
The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Penguin, 2004. The most penetrating analytical treatment of Franklin's public career.
Lemay, J.A. Leo.
The Life of Benjamin Franklin. 3 vols. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006-2009. The comprehensive scholarly biography.
Cohen, I. Bernard.
Benjamin Franklin's Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. The essential account of Franklin's scientific work.
The Pennsylvania Hospital
Morton, Thomas G.
The History of the Pennsylvania Hospital, 1751-1895. Philadelphia, 1895. The institutional history written by a hospital physician; indispensable.
Tomes, Nancy.
A Generous Confidence: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Art of Asylum-Keeping. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Context for the development of American psychiatric institutions after Rush.
Rush on Reform: Abolition, Punishment, and Temperance
Davis, David Brion.
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. The essential framework for understanding Rush's antislavery position.
Rorabaugh, W.J.
The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Documents the epidemic of alcohol abuse that Rush's temperance campaign responded to.
Meranze, Michael.
Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760-1835. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. The best account of the penal reform movement Rush participated in.
Rush and the Yellow Fever Epidemic
Powell, J.H.
Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949. The definitive narrative history.
Apel, Thomas A.
Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds: Science and the Yellow Fever Controversy in the Early American Republic. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. The best recent intellectual history of the debate.
Pernick, Martin S.
"Politics, Parties, and Pestilence." William and Mary Quarterly 29 (1972): 559-586. The essential analysis of the political dimensions.
Press, Controversy, and Public Life
Pasley, Jeffrey L.
"The Tyranny of Printers": Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001. Context for the Cobbett-Rush libel controversy.
Norris, George W.
The Early History of Medicine in Philadelphia. Philadelphia, 1886. A Philadelphia physician's account of the medical world Rush dominated.