Medical Inquiries and Observations upon Diseases of the Mind

Medical Inquiries and Observations, upon the Diseases of the Mind. By Benjamin Rush, M.D. Philadelphia: Published by Kimber & Richard-son, Merritt, Printer, 1812. 367 pp. A brief excerpt was published in Occupational Therapy 26 (1947): 177-80. Rush succinctly stated the purpose of this book in a 4 Nov. 1812 letter to John Adams, saying that the Inquiries "are in general accommodated to the 'common science of gentlemen of all professions as well as medicine. The subjects of them have hitherto been enveloped in mystery. I have endeavored to bring them down to the level of all the other diseases of the human body, and to show that the mind and body are moved by the same causes and subject to the same laws." Butterfield refers (Letters, 1132, n.6, following the above passage from the Adams letter) to the general consensus that Rush's application of this unified view of mind and body "forms the starting-point of psychiatric science in this country. His treatise at once became the standard American guide in its field and remained without a rival for many decades.”

From Catalog II

The first systematic American treatise on mental illness and Rush's most enduring medical legacy. Three decades of clinical observation at the Pennsylvania Hospital -- of the "maniacs" and "melancholics" in the lower ward -- produced this classification of mental disease and its treatment. Rush divided the conditions into "intellectual derangements" (mania, tristimania, amenomania) and "moral or corporeal derangements," arguing that all were ultimately physical conditions rooted in the blood vessels of the brain. The book is both a founding document of American psychiatry and a window into the limits of Rush's medical materialism -- the same theoretical framework that generated his yellow fever treatment generated his "tranquilizer chair" for the mentally ill.