Subject · 26 objects

Philadelphia's Medical World

The Edinburgh training, the College of Physicians, the materia medica, and the instruments — the whole apparatus by which a Philadelphia physician was made.

RUSH was the most influential medical teacher in American history. This is not a claim that requires much qualification. From his appointment to the College of Philadelphia's faculty in 1769 until his death in 1813, he trained more than three thousand students — virtually every physician practicing in the early republic had either passed through his lectures or had been trained by someone who did. The physicians who settled the Ohio Valley, the Deep South, and the frontier territories carried Rush's methods, Rush's theories, and Rush's moral commitments into every corner of the new nation.

Rush lectured on everything. The institutes and practice of medicine, the theory and treatment of fever, the diseases of the mind, the influence of climate and social conditions on health, the proper method of studying the science, the moral obligations of the physician as a public servant. His lectures were famous for their confidence, their range, and their opinionated energy. He did not teach medical facts; he taught a way of thinking about illness, society, and the physician's responsibilities that his students found either compelling or infuriating, and sometimes both.

The apparatus of Rush's teaching is documented throughout this collection: the lecture tickets that were the currency of access; the signed diplomas that certified transmission; the lecture texts, published and annotated; the textbooks Rush adopted and the students who pushed back against them. Together they constitute a documentary record of what it meant to receive a medical education in Rush's Philadelphia — the most medically sophisticated city in early America.

Read the full chapter: Rush the Educator (Catalog II)

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