Benjamin Rush
Books
- The Summer the Capital Emptied Yellow Fever, Race, and the Collapse of Philadelphia in 1793 · Liszt Think
In August 1793, yellow fever struck Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital. Within weeks, George Washington fled and half the city followed. Five thousand died before the first frost. Amid the exodus, Dr.
- The Nation’s New Seat of Government…etreating to country houses or boarding houses in the countryside. Those who remained lived with the heat and the smell and the crowds. Dr. Benjamin Rush walked the streets of Philadelphia with a physician’s eye and a reformer’s conviction. A signer of the Declaration of Independence, Rush ha…
- A Philosophy of the Blood and the Bile…d heroic medicine, firmly believing in such practices as bloodletting patients, as well as purges using calomel and other toxic substances. Benjamin Rush, not because he was unique, but because he was the most prominent exponent of a medical orthodoxy that would shape Philadelphia’s response…
- The Coffee-House Exchange and the Waterfront StenchHe was thinking about the truth. Benjamin Rush sat at his writing desk on a humid evening late in July 1793, composing a lecture on the unity of disease. All illness was one. The same mo…