Profiles in Character: Benjamin Rush Advocates for a Better Society Despite Opposition
On August 18, 1769, twenty-three-year-old Dr. Benjamin Rush visited John Macpherson, a naval officer living four miles outside Philadelphia. Macpherson had been judged mad and was confined by chains on a bed of straw. Most people diagnosed insane were chained in dark, cold underground cells in the city. Rush, though not in charge of Macpherson’s treatment, was deeply troubled. He would soon come to attack this common practice.
Rush graduated from the College of New Jersey at fourteen, completed medical training in Edinburgh and London at twenty-two and had returned to the colonies to begin his medical practice. He challenged the prevailing belief that the “insane” were inhabited by demons and/or morally deficient, with chains and prayer the only possible treatments. He concluded their illness was instead a treatable medical disease. He argued for moving them into warm, light-filled rooms and providing physical exercise. This took until 1796 to fully accomplish in the city’s Pennsylvania Hospital.
This was not the only time he called attention to serious societal issues. His 1784 pamphlet on “the Effects of Spiritous Liquors upon the Human Body and Their Influence Upon the Happiness of Society” was, as noted in Stephen Fried’s biography Rush, an early description of chronic alcohol abuse.
As medical advisor to George Washington, he successfully urged smallpox inoculation for soldiers, which preserved the army’s ability to fight. As an army surgeon-general, he pioneered public health practices. “Fatal experience,” he wrote, “has taught the people of America the truth . . . that a greater proportion of men perish with sickness in all armies than fall by the sword.” He advised soldiers to keep their hair short, change clothes often, eat more vegetables and wash their hands and face daily. Though over-ruled by his superior, he argued for isolating sick men to prevent the spread of contagious disease. Such opposition to superiors eventually forced his resignation.
Rush saved lives but made enemies doing so. Wounded by opposition, he remained undaunted, trusting to the future for redemption:
“The most acceptable men in practical society have been those who have never shocked their contemporaries by opposing popular or common opinions. Men of opposite characters, like objects placed too near the eye, are seldom seen distinctly by the age in which they live. They must content themselves with the prospect of being useful to the distant and more enlightened generations which are to follow them.”
Being a social gadfly went beyond medicine. As Fried notes, his pre-revolutionary war pamphlet against slavery “was received as one of the most blistering rhetorical attacks on slavery ever seen in the colonies” in a city where a fourth of households held slaves. He claimed that African Americans had the same capacities for learning and virtue as everyone else. In 1775, he helped found what became the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. He argued against capital punishment and the use of convict work gangs whose clothes marked them as pariahs and damaged them psychologically in ways he felt would increase recidivism.
Rush was a patriot, a fervent advocate for a new nation and its promise despite the fact that in Pennsylvania one-third of its residents were loyalists and another third were Quakers who shunned violence. He helped Thomas Paine as he wrote Common Sense, the powerful call for separation from England published in January 1776. Rush both suggested the title and found the publisher. He signed the Declaration of Independence, which branded him a traitor to England. He fought a losing battle in Pennsylvania against a requirement that candidates for writing its constitution swear a Christian Oath.
After victory in the Revolutionary War he focused on what self-government demanded of citizens. In his 1787 “Address to the People of the United States” he said:
“The American war is over; but this is far from being the case with the American revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed. It remains yet to establish and perfect our new forms of government; and to prepare the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens, for these forms of government.”
For Rush, education was critical for creating what he called “republican machines.” He proposed a plan for establishing public schools in Pennsylvania for women as well as men and for people of all races. Education would include “the principles of liberty and government; and the obligations of patriotism.” Against those who approved education for women only in the “female arts,” he called such views “the prejudice of little minds.”
Rush believed in being guided by observation and facts, not being bound by prevailing opinion. He was a lifelong student, telling his medical students they “should always, like a plant, be in an absorbing state.” Being human, of course, he was subject to error, believing too long in the power of bloodletting to cure disease. He understood fallibility, however, commenting that “[T]he human mind seldom arrives at truth upon any subject, till it has first reached the extremity of error.” Still, in many ways his foresight served future generations well.
Photo Credit: Charles Wilson Peale painting; commons.wikimedia.org
