The Bee, 11 October 1797: Rush announces his suits

A Connecticut newspaper carrying, from the Philadelphia Gazette, Rush's own public notice: "Mr. Brown, Having brought actions against John Fenno, jun. and William Cobbett, for their publications against me in their papers, I request you not to insert any thing in your paper which may be offered, in answer to those publications, or in defence of my character. BENJ. RUSH."

Two suits, not one. Fenno's Gazette of the United States and Cobbett's Porcupine's Gazette had both gone after Rush's practice through the fever of that autumn, and Rush went after both. Having done so, he asked the newspapers to print nothing more on either side, including anything in his own defence. He had answered his critics in print for twenty years and had decided that this time the court would answer for him.

Below the notice the paper prints the attack itself. Cobbett, it says, speaking of Dr. Rush, wrote that "He has long, very long, been sedulously employed in scuffling up his little hillock of fame; I will down with it for him just as the peasant with his foot undoes the labours of the pismire." The editor then makes the point the trial would turn on: the opposition to Rush's system of practice arises, though in reality from his political principles, apparently from his frequent use of the lancet, and yet the papers carry a list of twenty-six of the most respectable physicians in Philadelphia who follow his example.

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