Main description:

Benjamin Rush (1745-1813) casts a long shadow over American medicine as well as over the social and political history of the American republic. The Philadelphia physician involved himself in numerous social, political, and scientific projects while maintaining a busy practice and lecturing to thousands of students over his career. As a result, attempts by historians to make sense of Rush and his world have been complicated and contradictory. Nevertheless, it is within that mixed narrative of the social, medical, and political that Rush's story becomes its most compelling.

At the end of the Revolutionary War, new American citizens found themselves in a new country. For Rush and his colleagues, that newness extended beyond a change in political structure. They believed that the physical challenges of growing cities and western expansion and the psychological challenges of new identities came together in ways that could help or hurt American health. From his vantage point at one of the nation's few medical schools, located in its intellectual capital, Rush developed a reputation as America's physician-while mixing social and scientific ideas for the "improvement" of the country as a whole. Putting Rush in this context, Benjamin Rush, Civic Health, and Human Illness in the Early American Republic goes beyond biography to explore his social and scientific networks and their role in the development of a distinctly American medical profession.

Contents:

Acknowledgments
Introduction: "Truth is a Unit"
Part I-Making an American System
Chapter 1-The Education of Benjamin Rush
Chapter 2-An American Physician
Chapter 3-Making and Sharing Medical Knowledge
Chapter 4-Learning from Bodies
Part II-Using an American System
Chapter 5-Explaining Variation in American Bodies
Chapter 6-Confronting Climatic Ills
Chapter 7-Care, Curing, and Prevention in American Institutions
Chapter 8-Prepping the Next Generation of "Republican Machines"
Epilogue

Bibliography
Abbreviations
Sources Cited

Index