FRANKLIN was sixty-three when Rush came home from Edinburgh in 1769 with the letter of introduction that had sent him there, and the two men had twenty-one years left together. They were not equals and did not pretend to be. What they shared was a city, and more exactly a set of institutions that Franklin had founded and that Rush would inhabit: the Library Company, the Philosophical Society, the Hospital, the College and its medical school, and the reform societies of the 1780s that met, as often as not, in Franklin's own house.
Catalog I tells the story of the two men in sequence — the letter, Edinburgh, the Hospital, the lecture room, the causes, the quarrels. This volume stands still and looks at the rooms. It holds the objects on which both their names appear, or in which one of them finished what the other had begun: the Hospital Franklin raised the money for in 1751 and Rush served for thirty years, in its promissory notes, its rules, and its physicians' papers; the catalogue of the library Franklin founded and his press printed, in the decade Rush read from it; the Transactions of the society Franklin proposed and Rush addressed; the herbal Franklin printed with Bartram's notes, twenty years before Rush learned the plants from Cullen; the stove Franklin invented, still being improved for the warming of hospitals when Rush was an old man; and the minutes of the abolition society of which Franklin was president and Rush a secretary.
Most of these institutions are still standing. The Library Company, the Philosophical Society, the Pennsylvania Hospital, and the University all keep the founder's name over the door and the physician's papers in their collections. What survives here is smaller and more particular: the paper the two men passed between them, and the buildings, on paper, that outlived them both.
They were not equals and did not pretend to be. What they shared was a set of rooms.
Chapter I · 5 objects
The Library Company and the American Philosophical Society, 1731–1802
Read the chapterThe two oldest of Franklin's institutions were made of the same people. The Junto of 1727 became the Library Company of 1731; the Library Company's members, with Bartram and the Bonds among them, became the Philosophical Society Franklin proposed in 1743.
Chapter II · 17 objects
Franklin's Foundation, Rush's Practice — 1751 to 1813
Read the chapterThe Pennsylvania Hospital was the product of a legislative maneuver so elegant that Franklin described it in his Autobiography as "the best of my political manoeuvres."1 In 1751, convinced that the Assembly would not fund a hospital directly, he proposed a conditional grant: the legislature would provide two thousand pounds if p.
Chapter III · 4 objects
The Academy, the Medical School, and the Science of the City, 1749–1810
Read the chapterFranklin founded things and left. The Academy of 1749 that became the College of 1755, the medical school of 1765, the Hospital of the previous chapter: each was his in conception and someone else's in operation, and the someone else, from 1769 onward, was very often Rush. The same was true of the science.
Chapter IV · 2 objects
Abolition, Punishment, and the Writer Both Men Touched, 1773–1797
Read the chapterIn the 1780s the two men were, for the first time, colleagues. Franklin had come home from Passy in 1785 to preside over the state, the Philosophical Society, and the Abolition Society; Rush was a secretary of the last, and read his papers on punishment at meetings convened in Franklin's house.
