Benjamin Rush, An Eulogium in Honor of the Late Dr. William Cullen

Cullen died in Edinburgh in February 1790. On 9 July the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, by unanimous vote, had Rush deliver his eulogy, and ordered it printed. He begins by telling the company that Cullen was the preceptor of many of us, and that although he shone in a distant hemisphere, many of the rays of his knowledge had fallen on this quarter of the globe.

What Rush praises here is the system he would spend the next twenty years dismantling: a complicated nosology, a distrust of the healing powers of nature, and a corresponding confidence in special remedies for each species of disease. Within three years the fever was in Philadelphia and he had decided there was but one fever in the world. Read after the event, this is the inventory of what he was about to reject, written by the man who owed it everything.

The title page carries the ownership signature of Nathaniel Potter, with the price, one shilling and sixpence, beside it, and a second hand adding "his Pupil." Potter was one of Rush's own students, took his degree at Philadelphia in 1796, and later held the chair of the theory and practice of medicine at Maryland, where he tried to disprove the contagiousness of yellow fever by inoculating himself with the black vomit. Cullen taught Rush, Rush taught Potter, and this is the book in which the first of those debts was paid, in the second one's hands.

No copy has come to auction since 1909.

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