Founding Father Benjamin Rush

And we continue with our American stories, and up next, well, one of our favorite regular subjects: American history. Doctor Benjamin Rush is America’s forgotten founding father. His signature on the Declaration of Independence comes immediately before that other famous Benjamin, and that, of course, would be Benjamin Franklin. The fruits of Rush’s underlying faith is the story, though, that we are about to hear from a prolific Founding Father’s biographer, Harlow Giles Unger. Harlowe is a New York Times-bestselling author of twenty-eight books, including “Doctor Benjamin Rush: The Founding Father Who Healed a Wounded Nation.” He is also a former Distinguished Visiting Fellow in American History at George Washington’s Mount Vernon. And we are telling this story because on this day, in seventeen forty-six, Benjamin Rush was born. Let’s take a listen.

Doctor Benjamin Rush was one of the most important of our Founding Fathers; in many ways, the most important. George Washington was unquestionably the father of our political and military structure, and Alexander Hamilton fathered our economic structure. But it was Doctor Benjamin Rush who fathered our social structure. He was the only doctor with a medical school degree who signed the Declaration of Independence, and with his signature, he began a lifelong struggle for abolition of slavery, for women’s rights, for a ban on child labor. He fought for establishment of universal, free public education. He was first to advocate temperate use of alcohol and opposed tobacco use. He demanded that other doctors treat the poor as well as the rich, African Americans as well as whites. Doctors wouldn’t treat African Americans then. He founded two great schools of higher education in Pennsylvania: Dickinson University in Carlisle and Franklin College, now known as Franklin and Marshall College. And he saved his alma mater, Prince College, from oblivion after British troops burned it down. Just after the young Doctor Rush won appointment to Philadelphia Hospital, as it was called then, he discovered a basement filled with starving human beings chained to walls, lying in their own filths, moaning, groaning, some with infected sores. Rush stormed into the hospital doctor’s office and demanded their release and transfer into clean hospital rooms. He agreed to take personal custody of them and to care for them, and then forced the hospital board eventually to add a wing to the hospital to house them. Though little by little, he saw most of them improved dramatically as he talked to them, listened to what they had to say, learned their interests, and introduced a range of recreational activities, arts and grafts, and what we now call physical therapy and occupational therapy. In listening to them, he developed a treatment he called talk therapy, what we now call psychotherapy. And that led to the release of the majority of them into civilian life. It was a miracle, a revolution in the treatment of the mentally ill, which has not changed since the beginnings of civilization. And this was fifty years before Sigmund Freud was even born. Doctor Benjamin Rush, not Sigmund Freud, discovered psychotherapy and other therapies for the mentally ill a century before Freud started writing about psychoanalysis. The American Psychiatric Association recognized Russia’s great achievements by putting his image on their official seal and designating him Father of American Psychiatry. Now, Russia’s deep concern for the human condition included an equally deep love of individual liberty, which is why he served in the Second Continental Congress and signed the Declaration of Independence. But he was not interested in a career in politics. He loved being a doctor, treating and curing the ill, and he wanted to heal the injured and cure the sick. So after signing the Declaration of Independence, he galloped out of Philadelphia and joined George Washington on the banks of the Delaware, opposite Trenton, New Jersey. On Christmas night of seventeen seventy-six, Washington’s army staged one of the most daring attacks in the Revolutionary War. They rode across the Delaware River through a driving snowstorm and overwhelmed a garrison of a thousand Hessian soldiers at dawn. As Hessian defenders fired back, some of their bullets inevitably hit their marks. One man, unarmed, rushed into battle not to fire a shot, but to stem the bleeding. Kneeling over the fallen, Doctor Benjamin Rush tried something no doctor had ever done before: prevent death on the battlefield. Until then, armies routinely left their wounded to die. Everywhere in the world, if a soldier could not run, walk, limp, or crawl off the battlefield, he was left to die. There were no doctors around to help. There really was no choice. There was no such thing as an antiseptic. The vast majority of the badly injured, in peace as well as war, died from blood poisoning, except sepsis. There was nothing anyone could do. Troops couldn’t help. Doctors or priests could do nothing except pray, and that seldom saved any lives, at least here on Earth. For Doctor Benjamin Rush, however, it seemed obscene to let men die fighting and bleeding for his country. After fighting ended at Trenton, he demanded that Washington set up field hospitals of a sort. Washington commandeered nearby houses, and Rush used them as field hospitals to form what would later become the Army Medical Corps, the first such corps in the world. Rush didn’t save many of the wounded, of course. There was no way he could. Medicine and medical care were still too primitive. Anesthesia, antiseptics, antibiotics—none of those existed when he went to work trying to save a soldier’s life. When he had to amputate a soldier’s limb, he fed the patient whiskey or rum and told him to bite on a piece of wood as hard as he could while Rush went to work with his scalpel. Within a minute or two, most soldiers passed out, and infections would later kill at least two-thirds of them within a few days. But in listening to this, remember that anesthesia didn’t exist. The hollow-point needle, they weren’t invented until eighteen fifty. The stethoscope, blood transfusion, even simple aspirin. All of these things were fifty to one hundred years in the future when Rush walked onto that battlefield in Trenton. Hospitals, like battlefields—hospitals were places where the badly injured or sick went to die. You didn’t go to a hospital to have them save your life. If you were sick, you stayed at home and used worthless home remedies. Doctor Benjamin Rush only started the scientific revolution in medicine and did not live long enough to see any substantial progress in healthcare. But he could and did begin the job, and because of his status in Philadelphia society, he did live to see some of the results of his pioneering efforts. Philadelphia at the time was America’s political, cultural, and economic center, and the signers of the Declaration of Independence were America’s richest, most powerful men. Although Rush was not born to wealth—he was a farmer’s son—he was superbly well educated. He went to Prince and then to the University of Edinburgh Medical School, which was the best medical school in the world at the time. He finished his studies in London, where Benjamin Franklin introduced him to England’s most distinguished thinkers and scientists. Although he treated Philadelphia’s rich and famous, he spent most of his time treating the poor, even African Americans, the first Caucasian doctor in America to do so.

And you’re listening to Harlow Giles Unger tell the story of Doctor Benjamin Rush. And I thought I knew quite a bit about Rush, but that medical unit and his invention of the idea of a medical corps, I had no idea that this was his way of volunteering in our fight against the British. More of the Benjamin Rush story, born on this day in seventeen forty-six. Here on our American Stories. And we continue with our American stories and with author Harlow Giles Unger, and he has written a terrific book about the life of Benjamin Rush, called “Doctor Benjamin Rush: The Founding Father Who Healed a Wounded Nation.” And we’re telling this story because on this day, in seventeen forty-six, Benjamin Rush was born. Let’s pick up when we last left off.

Doctors north, southeast, and west refused even to consider treating African Americans at the time. Nor did many of them consider treating the poor. The poor were, in cities at least, dirty. They smelled. They couldn’t read or write. The slums they lived in had no water, no sewers. Conditions were horrible in the slums of America’s cities. No one who called himself a doctor, even quacks, willingly set foot in the slums or wanted anything to do with those who lived there, except Doctor Benjamin Rush. Listen to Rush as he describes his daily rounds: “I led a life of constant labor. I led a life in which my shop was crowded with the poor in the morning and at meal times. And I visited nearly every street and alley in the city every day. Often have I ascended the upper story of huts by a ladder. I had to sit on beds. There were no chairs. I risked not only taking their disease, but being infected by vermin. I seldom went to bed before twelve o’clock.” Again, those are the words of Doctor Benjamin Rush when he was treating patients. Though he haunted the Pennsylvania State Assembly, demanding social reforms aimed directly or indirectly at improving the health of the city’s population. Every social advance that he demanded was tied to health. He was the first to call for public sanitation. He wanted to sweep away the garbage, the sewage, and stagnant water, all of which he believed promoted disease. But science being what it was, he had no way of proving it and had to struggle with recalcitrant city and state officials to get them to hire street cleaners. And the way he convinced them was not by telling them how dirty the city was. He showed them how they and the city and the state would profit economically by cleaning the streets. He championed abolition of slavery, and as president of the Abolition Society, he naturally decried the cruelties of slavery. But the only way he could convince Pennsylvania legislators to abolish slavery was to show them how the state would benefit economically by freeing African Americans to make greater contributions to society. In seventeen eighty, he succeeded, and the Pennsylvania Assembly passed the first state law in America banning slavery. But Rush didn’t stop there. He was distressed by the condition of free blocks in Philadelphia. He walked directly into their midst to treat them and their children medically. He was the first white doctor in America to do so, and after winning their trust, he urged them to build their own African American church, the first such church in America. He not only raised funds to build that church, he joined its parishioners at its dedication. When people don’t realize that Founding Fathers did not invent slavery when they were born—the slaves were already on the land almost a century, actually. Virginia tobacco growers, the great plantation owners at the turn of the eighteenth century, early seventeen hundreds, petitioned Queen Anne to stop sending slaves there. The slave population in the so-called Sugar Islands at the time in the Caribbean had grown so large that they just couldn’t absorb any more slaves. But slavery—slave trading had become a huge proportion of the British government’s income, so they just arbitrarily started dumping slaves off the ships in Virginia for the plantation owners. And they didn’t want them. They petitioned Queen Anne to not send any more slaves. Number one, they were illiterate. Number two, they couldn’t speak English. And number three, tobacco planting, picking, and harvesting and curing is a skilled trade. It takes a lot of knowledge to do that carefully and do it properly. Queen Anne wouldn’t listen. She needed those revenues, so she just kept sending slave ships over here. Well, that generation plantation owner died, another generation grew up and died, and now we get to the generation of our Founding Fathers, Jefferson, Washington, and the others. And they’re born on lands in which by law, by British law, and subsequently early American laws, slaves were not human beings. They were property, and they were as much a part of each property as they were as trees were, and you did not have the right. You could go to jail if you freed your slaves. Period. So it wasn’t until they were in their adult years that men like Washington and quite a few others saw the cruelty of slavery, the immorality of it, all the evils of slavery, and tried to figure out a way around the law. Well, they didn’t have control of the… they didn’t have majorities in the state assemblies, but they couldn’t do anything under British law. After the Revolution, they had a former government. First of all, during the Confederation, each state was independent from the others. That lasted until seventeen eighty, and now you have a federal government. They had other things to do right away. They had to set up an executive branch, they had to set up a judiciary, and that took years. Meanwhile, people like Washington were looking into the law, and they found a way around the law. But the only way around it was in your last will and testament. That superseded the law, the written law of every state. And that’s why Washington and his spouse, Martha, freed their, emancipated their slaves under Washington’s will, and Richard Henry Lee did… many, many Southern leaders did the same thing, and that’s all they could do under the law at that time. At the time, there was an army of quacks calling themselves doctors, who rode into every town and village across America selling patent medicines. All of them were nothing more than fruit-flavored whiskey or rum that cured patients by rendering them senselessly drunk and oblivious to their illnesses, their injuries. He charged them with killing their patients rather than curing them. He called for a law restricting the use of the title “doctor” to graduates of recognized medical schools or to those who had served apprenticeships, which was common in those days, apprenticeships with other doctors.

And you’re listening to Harlow Giles Unger, who’s the author of “Doctor Benjamin Rush: The Founding Father Who Healed a Wounded Nation.” He is also a former Distinguished Visiting Fellow in American History at George Washington’s Mount Vernon. If you’re ever in Washington, D.C., give yourself an extra day and a half and go to Mount Vernon and then go to Montpelier and, of course, Jefferson’s home, Monticello, in Charlottesville. It’s about an hour and a half due south, and you’ll see the residences of these great founders. It’s a beautiful field trip for a family, going through the beautiful mountain country of Virginia and throughout Albemarle County itself, which is one of the most beautiful counties in the country. More of the Benjamin Rush story, born on this day in seventeen forty-six. Here on our American Stories. And we continue with our American stories and with Harlow Giles Unger as he continues to unpack the story of Founding Father, Doctor Benjamin Rush, and his reforms and accomplishments in the medical industry. And we’re telling this story because on this day, in seventeen forty-six, Benjamin Rush was born. Let’s continue with Harlow Unger.

He wrote the first Code of Ethics for doctors, which was still in effect in America until the Second World War. And he wrote an even more important work called “Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind.” It was the first English-language work written on psychiatry. It became the basic textbook for studies in psychiatry in America for the next century until the beginning of the twentieth century. That work was so remarkable that, as I said before, the American Psychiatric Association put his image on its official seal and placed a bronze plot on his grave, declaring him Father of American Psychiatry. To this day, I don’t know why the world celebrates Freud instead of Doctor Benjamin Rush. I didn’t mention that he was a great teacher, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, and a professor of chemistry. He wrote the first American chemistry book. He trained more than three thousand doctors, real doctors with M.D. degrees. And there’s still more. I told you he was Father of American Psychiatry, but I didn’t tell you that he was also father of—and you’ll never guess this—the Father of American Veterinary Medicine. In eighteen oh seven, he delivered a lecture, then published a pamphlet on the medical care of domestic animals. It was the first such work ever published in America. The idea came to him years earlier, after he had finished his medical studies in England. He went to Paris, and it was in Paris that he visited what was then the world’s first school of veterinary medicine. It had been founded to combat a cattle plague, but its efforts eventually improved the quality of animal life so much that farmer revenues began shooting up. In seventeen ninety-five, Rush went to Washington, who was a great farmer, Franklin, who wasn’t a farmer, but he was a brilliant scientist, and formed a group of others to form a society to promote the development of veterinary medicine in America, with Rush writing a pamphlet citing the benefits of veterinary medicine to farmers and to the nation’s agriculture. At the time, ninety-five percent of Americans lived or worked or owned farms. Why doesn’t America celebrate this great Founding Father? Well, America doesn’t really celebrate any Founding Fathers anymore. The memories of both Washington and Can have been subsumed by shopping on what’s now called President’s Day. That ignores both of them. But to answer my own quest