Founding Healer
You’ve probably never heard of Dr. Benjamin Rush — the only doctor to sign the Declaration. Although his star has faded over time, his influence over the better-known founders was second to none.
Today, Rush’s name is often associated with his mistaken faith in bloodletting as the remedy for everything from mental illness to Yellow fever. Suffering from cramps? Try letting out a few ounces of blood. For persistent headaches, drain a whole pint. In the most extreme cases, like the mysterious and deadly virus that caused hemorrhaging and jaundice in many colonial cities in the decades following the American Revolution, Dr. Rush prescribed repeated and prolonged lettings of up to 75% of his patients’ blood.
In hindsight, his treatments of the Yellow fever epidemic were ineffective (and in some cases made his patients worse), but Rush also intuited one of the root causes in the damp, filthy streets of the time. He thought the illness resulted from a toxic miasma emanating from the moisture, when in fact it was spread by mosquitos breeding in stagnant water pools. In any event, his tireless campaigning for improved sanitation and hygiene were a major part of the solution. This was just one of his many passionate causes, along with abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage and education, and prison reform.
Like all of the Founding Fathers, Rush was a product of his time. He studied under the best and brightest, and tended to thousands of poor and sick with his burgeoning knowledge of medicine. It’s easy to focus on his blunders, borne of the universal ignorance of medicine of his time, and look past his many humanitarian accomplishments. Harlow Unger, the prolific historian who has authored 10 biographies of founding fathers, has released the antidote to this one-sided treatment of a fascinating but little-known figure of American history in his new biography, Dr. Benjamin Rush: The Founding Father Who Healed a Wounded Nation.
Unger records Rush’s close relationships with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, and tells how he healed a divided nation at many critical junctures. In Unger’s history, Dr. Rush’s pioneering social work lays a foundation for the fulfillment of the Constitution’s promise of equal liberty for all. Dispelling the notion that history is all dates and names, Unger casts the story of Rush’s life and times in such vivid detail that the reader feels as if he was amid the horrible outbreak of Yellow fever. This disease simultaneously devastated city populations along the Eastern Seaboard but (as we learn in Chapter 6) it may have also saved the fledgling union from a rebellion brewing in New York at the hands of a zealous French envoy to the U.S. named Edmund-Charles Genet.
Even the avid student of American history will learn much from Unger’s book (buy it on Amazon), and my recent conversation with him on the show of ideas, not attitude.
LINKS:
- @Harlowunger on Twitter
- Founding Father, Feb 22 2018 | Video | C-SPAN.org
- The Book: Dr. Benjamin Rush: The Founding Father Who Healed a Wounded Nation
Related Shows:
- How Washington Invented the Presidency, with Harlow Giles Unger, 6/5/14
- Thugs and Gangsters — The Real Story of the Boston Tea Party, with Harlow Giles Unger, 1/6/2013
