Sixteen Introductory Lectures, to Courses of Lectures Upon the Practice of Medicine, With a Syllabus of the Latter

Sixteen Introductory Lectures, to Courses of Lectures Upon the Practice of Medicine, With a Syllabus of the Latter. To which are added, Two Lectures upon the Pleasures of the Senses and of the Mind; With an Inquiry to Their Proximate Cause.

Delivered in the University of Pennsylvania. Phila.: Bradford and Innskeep, 1811

This printed version of Rush's medical lectures at the University ofPennsylvania includes an 1810 lecture on the study of medical jurisprudence- thought to be the fisrt American treatise published on the subject. Rush opens his lecture stating, “They entertain very limited views of medicine, who suppose its objects and duties are confined exclusively to the knowledge and cure of diseases. Out science was intended to renderother services to society. It was designed to extend its beliefs to the protection of property and lifem and to detect fraud and guilt in many of their forms…The lectures you are about to attend upon…... contain the rudiments of all that is necessary for you to know in order to render you competent witnesses in a court of justice." Rush also lectures on the importance of treating the patients mental health and even on veterinary medicine.

From Catalog II

Rush's final systematic pedagogical statement, published two years before his death. Ranging across the moral and intellectual formation of the physician -- how to read, how to observe, how to think about the relationship between medicine and religion, between clinical practice and social reform -- the lectures are Rush at his most characteristic. Alyn Brodsky, in his biography Benjamin Rush: Patriot and Physician (2004), calls the Sixteen Lectures "Rush's intellectual testament," and the characterization is apt: it is the physician's self-portrait, drawn at the end of a life lived as an argument.