No Rush to Judgment
Benjamin Rush is one of those influential people who happened to be around a bunch of famous and influential people, so he fades into the background easily but also pops up a lot once you start noticing him.
He attended Princeton University and the University of Edinburgh. He later taught at the University of Pennsylvania as a professor of chemistry and published one of the first American textbooks on chemistry. He signed the Declaration of Independence and was at Pennsylvania’s Constitutional Convention, briefly serving as a surgeon-general for the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Thomas Paine, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and a littany of physicians and chemists ran in the same influential circles as Rush. We have access to a lot of his correspondence that we can look at when examining medicine in the colonial and post-independence era. He taught both future-President William Henry Harrison and Meriwether Lewis of the (in)famous Lewis & Clarke expedition at the instructions of President Jefferson.
Rush was active in social justice in a way that shows decency was always possible, regardless of the time period and social norms. He strongly opposed slavery as “so foreign to the human mind, that the moral faculties, as well as those of the understanding are debased, and rendered torpid by it.” He thought there was no reasonable interpretation of scientific evidence that would suggest there was any natural inferiority by race, though he also thought being black was a hereditary yet curable skin disease after meeting someone with vitiligo, which warranted policies against interracial mixing. On criminal justice, he opposed public punishments, solitary confinement, slavery or forced labor, and the death penalty. Although he had prejudices against women learning advanced sciences, he proposed education plans for the women of wealthier families and helped found one of the first higher education institutions for women in America. He set up a medicinal dispensary for the poorest workers and advised various public health projects that led to a reduction in disease outbreaks. While he did subscribe to the notion that indigenous nations were “primitive” rather than “civilized,” he took a genuine interest in health disparities between indigenous nations and colonial settlers.
An Inquiry into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors
Rush’s