Medicine among the Indians
Rush delivered it before the American Philosophical Society on February 4, 1774, at twenty-eight, and it was his first public performance as a medical thinker: an inquiry into what a people without physicians did about disease, and what their health said about the diseases of civilization. He approved of the practices that resembled his own — bleeding, sweating, purging — and dismissed the rest; but the question he asked, whether civilization made people sick, stayed with him for forty years.
Rare: one copy at auction in forty years, eight in the auction record altogether. Printed by Joseph Crukshank in the year the collection's Revolution begins.
Oration Delivered February 4, 1774, before the American Philosophical Society, Held at Philadelphia. Containing, An Enquiry into the Natural History of Medicine among the Indians in North-America, and A Comparative View of Their Diseases and Remedies, with those of Civilized Nations
Rush's oration before the American Philosophical Society, February 4, 1774: the first treatise on North American Indian medicine published in North America. Rush learned what he knew from travelers and from the occasional Native visitors to Philadelphia, and judged their practices by whether they matched his own. Rare — one copy at auction in forty years, eight in the auction record altogether.