The Fascinating Life of America's Forgotten Founding Father
Episode Stats
Summary
The 18th century doctor, civic leader, and renaissance man Benjamin Rush was one of the youngest signers of the Declaration of Independence, edited and named Thomas Pynchon s Common Sense, implemented medical practices that helped the continental army win the revolutionary war, made sure Benjamin Franklin attended the constitutional convention, and shaped the medical and political landscape of the newly formed United States. Yet, despite his outsized influence, the varied, interesting life he led, and the close relationships he had with other founding fathers like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, he is hardly remembered today.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast the 18th century
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doctor civic leader and renaissance man benjamin rush was one of the youngest signers of the
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declaration of independence edited and named thomas payne's common sense implemented medical
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practices that helped the continental army win the revolutionary war made sure benjamin franklin
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attended the constitutional convention and shaped the medical and political landscape of the newly
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formed united states yet despite his outsized influence the varied interesting life he led and
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the close relationships he had with other founding fathers like george washington thomas jefferson and
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john adams rush is hardly remembered today that's because of just how close his relationship with
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other founders was rush was a personal physician to them and their families and after his death
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they suppressed his legacy not wanting the intimate and unflattering details he recorded in his letters
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and journals to be publicized in fact his memoir was considered too dangerous to be published it
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wasn't found for nearly 150 years my guest will reintroduce us to this forgotten figure his name
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is steven freed and he's the author of rush revolution madness visionary doctor became a founding father
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today on the show steven takes us through rush's fascinating life from his self-made rise out of an
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inauspicious childhood to how he's able to reconcile and estranged jefferson and adams before his death
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and what steven has learned from studying a character who lived through very fraught and not totally
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unfamiliar times after the show's over check out our show notes at awim.is slash rush
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steven freed welcome to the show great thanks for having me so you have written a biography about a
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founding father but it's not benjamin franklin it's not george washington not thomas jefferson or john
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adams it's about a guy that i think a lot of people haven't heard of it's this doctor named
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benjamin rush and rush was an interesting character because he was close to a lot of the founders in
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fact he was the the personal physician for a lot of these guys uh he also kind of acted as the go
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between with the founders when they had drama and spats between each other and when rush died a lot of
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the other founding fathers tried to suppress his story because they didn't want anything that was
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unflattering in the letters that they had written to each other to get out there in the public
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so as a result of that a lot of people just overlook rush today which is unfortunate because
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this guy had a big role in the american revolution and also in the field of medicine in early america
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so let's dig into the life of benjamin rush we're going to introduce the world to rush it needs it
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needs to be done okay so many of the founding fathers they were aristocrats landowners part of the
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gentry some of them were self-made like benjamin franklin benjamin rush was also self-made
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so tell us about his upbringing and rise in the world well you're right in separating the founders who
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were self-made and the ones who came into wealth and rush was definitely somebody who was self-made
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both in medicine and in politics so his family owned a farm outside of philadelphia his father
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was a blacksmith he moved the family into town when benjamin rush was very young and then he died when
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rush was five and so rush's mom was a working mom she opened a store on market street right down the
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street from benjamin franklin's printing press and she supported the family she later married
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not very well and so rush was brought up by her and he was a presbyterian which is not one of the
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best religions to be in philadelphia at this time which was very quaker and and very church of england
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later uh episcopal church so he was sent to a religious boarding school in maryland that was run by
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his mother's cousin so his uncle and i maybe have that wrong it was definitely his uncle and so
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because he was considered quite gifted he was really smart he was a great talker he had this really high
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forehead even as a little kid that people sort of notioned that there was so much going on in his head
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that it was like bursting out but he was just extremely smart made amazing connections had an incredible
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memory and was just utterly fascinated by everything intellectual everything religious everything
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scientific and so he went to this boarding school in maryland as did his younger brother many people
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from philadelphia went to this boarding school he then was admitted at age 14 to what became princeton
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then the college of new jersey as a junior graduated in the next year at age 16 and then decided to
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apprentice as a physician and so he apprenticed to a physician in philadelphia john redmond
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and this is at a time when there were no american medical schools so to get at a medical degree you
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had to go overseas and so rush apprentice for several years he actually started taking classes in what
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was what became the first medical school in america at the college of philadelphia which
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benjamin franklin had started and his mentors there were recently trained doctors who were quite
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brilliant but then also fought over which of them started the school which is the thing that rush got
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caught in the middle of basically you know even among the doctors some of them were rich guys who
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came from second and third generation doctors and some of them were people who would work their way up
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and so rush was always considered somebody who was not born into money and never had a ton of money
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but had amazing ideas his brain was just so fascinating and of course he became people's doctors
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so he had this interesting relationship with them all through this time he's younger than the other
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founders but he was like their young doctor who like gave them their first smallpox vaccination and
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they would ask him medical questions part of the reason that adams and jefferson didn't want their
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letters back and forth to rush become public is because they would often concern both political
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religious issues and then really personal medical issues like you know i have really bad diarrhea what
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should i do about that yeah talking about poop uh yeah even the founding fathers did it well
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something that that really you really hit home and it's really impressed me about rush ever since he
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was a child very curious this self-starter and something that he did that a lot of young upstarts did
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back in you know 17th century 18th century is he had a commonplace book and the guy just wrote down
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everything how did that mental habit shape him for the rest of his life he did you know what's
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interesting i found you know when i had the same question you had and then i looked into it and i
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saw that even then there's apparently a debate about how memory works of course we're still debating
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that and the debate was do you take notes and that makes you remember or do you listen and not take
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notes and that makes you remember most of rush's teachers thought you shouldn't take notes but rush took
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notes and so what's wonderful is after a certain point we have them i mean a lot of things that rush
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wrote are gone i'm still hoping they will bubble up somewhere but his commonplace books are wonderful
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and part of the value of them is of course he did it when he was a kid he did it when he was a student
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and then when he was in the continental congress he kept them about what it was like to be in the
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continental congress he would write little sketches about what he thought about the people in the
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continental congress no holds barred so he just he wrote a lot and so we have a lot of it we're missing a
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lot of it but everything we have is what's really nice about it also is that he wasn't a formal writer
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so he wrote in a style that we would today think of as almost like magazine writing and it's part of
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the reason that he was such an accessible intellectual and such an accessible writer is because his writing
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style and of course his penmanship were really readable and you when you read them today they seem
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quite contemporary let's talk about these uh doctors that he they're medical school teachers
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uh it was morgan and then the other guy was uh shipping yeah so so rush has a really interesting
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young life so he decides to become a doctor and in 1865 he begins an apprenticeship with john redmond
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who's very established doctor and then during the next couple years two young brilliant doctors come
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home from edinburgh which is the top medical school in the world to set up their lives in philadelphia
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one of them is john morgan and john morgan is like rush a guy who comes from relative poverty and
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has worked his way up the other is william shipping jr whose doc whose father is already a big deal
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doctor shipping comes back starts the first anatomy class ever taught in america which rush was one of
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the first students in and was doing live dissections which was quite controversial and these were the
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first classes like this in america and then morgan came back and actually asked the college if he could
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start a medical school morgan and shipping had been friends shipping went nuts when morgan said he would
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hire him for the medical school rather than name him as the co-founder and they never like spoke again
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unless they had to and rush because he'd been mentored by both of them he had been morgan students too
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was always stuck in the middle of them and morgan helped him a lot shipping went out of his way not
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to help him and what's interesting is of course these doctors not only were benjamin rush's main
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mentors in philadelphia they turned out to be the main doctors of george washington's army
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and so rush ended up getting caught in the middle of their fight again during the war which caused
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washington no end of disbelief that doctors could be so petty and stupid when something so important as
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the revolutionary war was going on that they were fighting over just stupid stuff and so so rush learned
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early on that people can be petty and jealous and competitive and that you had to deal with that
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and so he was he became very smart about that but at the same time he was very opinionated and sometimes
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he wouldn't stop even though he knew like how it would go down so another important figure from
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philadelphia that had a big influence on rush's life is benjamin franklin so you said that he lived
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down the street from benjamin franklin did they know each other as like did he know like he go over
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ben's house be like hey uncle ben you know what i mean what was the nature of their relationship
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no you know what's interesting one people forget that benjamin franklin was in europe during many of
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the important periods in the american pre-revolutionary revolution so even though franklin franklin's wife and
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family lived down the street from the rushes we have no evidence that they knew each other
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in their early years what we know is that when rush went to medical school you know in his late
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teens he was he and another doctor he went with wrote letters to franklin to introduce themselves
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to him and let them know that they were fellow pennsylvanians who would come to england and come
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to scotland for training and franklin wrote them some letters of introduction he was in london and he
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so he introduced them to some of the enlightenment figures who were in edinburgh and that was wonderful for
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rush and then after rush graduated from medical school he came to london he finally met franklin
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what's really interesting is that rush kept a diary of his time edinburgh a diary of his time in london
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and a diary of his time late in france which which is where franklin helped him go the london diary is
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missing and no one knows why the other ones we have it could be because franklin you know he saw
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something you know franklin was not considered sort of like the best husband um you know who knows what
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was in those diaries but so we don't know a lot of details about what happened when the two bends met
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but the it was a really important thing for benjamin rush benjamin franklin was a mentor of his his entire
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life would send him letters from europe about scientific issues about medical issues about
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political issues and then interestingly when franklin came home and was quite ill rush helped
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take care of him and also made sure that he got his due i mean what's really interesting is that people
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forget that the pennsylvania delegation to the constitution was not going to include franklin because
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he was too sick and rush is the one who insisted it's like hey this guy is benjamin franklin
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you are not going to not include him in the constitution of this country even if we have to
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carry him on a litter over to the meetings which in fact is what they did so they had a really
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interesting relationship it would be great if we knew more about it but a lot of things have been lost
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but what's very clear is that rush saw himself as somebody who could continue franklin's work and keep
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in mind that in philadelphia we have a different idea about franklin's work than the nation does in terms of
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contributions to the declaration or to the constitution franklin was the inventor of these
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sort of voluntary associations that would solve social problems that we that they didn't think the
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government would solve so he created the first fire company he created the first library he created the
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first hospital as things that people should create as donations because you didn't know the government
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would ever do these things and so rush picked up his work after he was dying and died and tried to
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continue this work because you know it's interesting we talk a lot about public health today you know
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back then there was no public health you know the closest thing they had to public health were the
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things that doctors volunteered to do pennsylvania hospital was free for poor people it was not a hospital
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like we think of today doctors volunteered their time to take care of the indigent there that's what it was
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that's what a hospital was people with money were treated at home even they when they had surgery
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they had it at home so what rush was trying to do was continue the intellectual life that franklin had
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created and i think just to a large degree he really did his role at the university of pennsylvania
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during the period especially during the period when the capital was in philadelphia is really not
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understood as well as it could be but when franklin died i mean there was a real need to make sure
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that the ideas that he had about what it meant to be a citizen you know what it meant to be an american
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what our responsibilities were to our fellow man especially to poor people and imprisoned people
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you know rush thought about these things a lot and so their relationship that the artifacts we have
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of it are amazing and fascinating and i continue to believe that there are more that we will find
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because you know some things are still in private hands a lot of things about the revolutionary
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period were bought by collectors a long time ago we still haven't seen them so i continue to hold
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out hope okay so early on in rush's medical career like you said he loved to write and he started
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writing pamphlets this was the equivalent of a blog right if you wanted to get the word out back in
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revolutionary times instead of starting a blog you'd start publishing pamphlets and start selling them
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i don't know if it's the same as a blog because it was a way of making money it was almost a way of
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publishing personal how about a how about a sub stack it's more like a sub stack i paid yeah i mean it's
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more like a zine remember zine yeah yeah yeah where you which you would make and you print them up
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yourself and you'd sell them like an alternative bookstore right that's more like what pamphlets
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yeah so he started putting these out but he's writing about health and he advocated for things
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like he was kind of ahead of his time he was advocating for temperance like hey guys take it easy
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on the hard liquor also said people should start exercising which was kind of weird for the 18th
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century but then his health writings they started to get a little political i mean he still wasn't in the
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public sphere as a as a as a politician but he did start getting political so how did his health
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writing lead to revolutionary rhetoric well so the first big thing that he published was you're correct
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it was a guide basically for wealthy people to take better care of themselves because he when he came
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out of medical school his practice was very mixed what's cool about him is that his practice was mixed by
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race by socioeconomic class and many people couldn't afford to pay so he was hoping to get some paying
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customers so he put out a pamphlet which is really like the first self-help book and you're right it
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talks about temperance although we always have to remember that back in rush's day temperance didn't
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include wine and beer because wine was medicine and beer was not considered to be something dangerous
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alcoholically so temperance was hard liquors it's one of the first places that talks about the people
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exercising although you can always see rush always has like a political edge so he talks about the need for
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people to exercise but then he can't resist making an abolitionist statement because he's totally against
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slavery and he basically says well of course the reason you have to exercise is because all the things
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you're supposed to be doing outdoors you know you enslave people to do so if you didn't do that you
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wouldn't have to like learn how to exercise so part of the thing is that rush always had those kinds of
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comments which he would give a whole speech and then at the end he would make a comment having to do with
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abolition and how bad slavery is he'd make a comment about independence and just create a hot button
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issue when he wasn't originally talking about something else that was just rush so the leading
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abolitionist of the day anthony benezet read rush's thing and realized that rush could write on abolition
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issues so he encouraged rush to write a pamphlet on abolition and this is it came out in 1773 it's so
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early and it's certainly the earliest of any of the writings of the founders on these issues and so he
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wrote this pamphlet the self-help for rich people he wrote a pamphlet on abolition and that actually
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led to him being asked to be one of the ghost writers for the proclamation that led to the
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boston tea party so like every city was going to have a tea party boston just happened to do theirs first
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so the proclamation about why tea shouldn't be able to come into the country the philadelphia group that
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wrote their proclamation everybody liked that one best so that one was in the boston newspapers which led to
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the boston tea party in philadelphia they stopped the boat with the tea before it came to philadelphia
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and so these were the kinds of things he was known as somebody who could be a really good writer
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he was also really fast writer and so people saw initially that he was smart that he was had a lot
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of interesting ideas and that he could write things that the public would understand and i think a lot of
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what he did was trying to explain ideas to people as best he could and he was responsible that in a lot
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of different ways i mean many people don't know for example that he is the one who encouraged thomas
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payne to write what became common sense because he believed that somebody needed to explain the idea
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of independence especially to people in philadelphia who were not so into it because philadelphia was the
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most powerful city in the country at that point they had the most to lose by changing the world they
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lived in so rush didn't write it himself he'd started a pamphlet but he had gotten so much in so much
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trouble because of his abolition pamphlet he lost a lot of his customers because they found out he
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wrote the abolition pamphlet that he instead encouraged payne to write this pamphlet on independence
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the goal of which was to explain why independence was a good important thing and not something to be
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scared of and the process in 1775 of rush and payne that fall you know rush edited these pages as payne wrote
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them and then um he was the one who found the publisher for it and he actually named it so their
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relationship i wish there was we knew more about it we know about it mostly because rush talked about
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it later because at the time it was a big hit mystery who wrote common sense you know because
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of course the british would come and kill them so but it's it's really fascinating his ideas about
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explaining complicated ideas to the public and then later after the revolution he's trying to wrestle with
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the idea of what is an american citizen what are the responsibilities of a person in this country
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we just created i mean we're still debating this like every day what's interesting is that rush lays
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out a lot of the basic challenges because they're hardwired in the country they're not about the
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internet they're not about you know any pat any recent president they're about america and rush identified
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that immediately and that's why his writing on this is really you know it's timeless yeah i thought
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that was interesting this part of his life where it's going up the revolution it's like the early
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1770s he's a great writer he he has opinions that he wants to share but at the same time he struggles
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with okay i got a growing medical career here i i have to kind of figure out how to balance my ideals
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with sort of the day-to-day i got to pay the bills exactly he is not rich and he every time he does
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something political he knows there will be consequences yeah so he kind of as you say he kind of played
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behind the scenes he ghost wrote some things he encouraged thomas paine to to write common sense
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so he sticks to the margins when it comes to political life but then somehow he ends up being
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one of the signers of the declaration of independence so how did how did that happen how did he go from
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behind the scenes guy to i'm putting my my life on the line well he he started being more on the
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scenes in 1775 and 1776 he got married in early 1776 to julius stockton whose father richard stockton
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was what sort of the most powerful lawyer in new jersey and whose family had given the land for
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princeton who also became a signer and so he started getting more involved in 1776 and he was asked to
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write the you know not only was thomas jefferson writing a national supposedly national declaration of
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independence that everybody would sign on to but each state each you know uh colony had to write
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their own declaration of independence so rush was actually the leader of the writing group for the
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pennsylvania declaration of independence so he was involved at that point and then rush had been
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involved the only politics he'd been involved in were the state constitution and keep in mind there was
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no federal constitution so the state constitutions really mattered so he starts getting more involved
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and then you know what happens is you know he's close with this group of people who are the
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delegation from pennsylvania and one of the most outspoken members of the delegation is is john
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dickinson who's very well-known lawyer older than rush rush has known him for a long time
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rush's brother worked in his law firm and dickinson felt very strongly that the declaration of
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independence was coming too soon so he wouldn't sign it because he thought it was too soon to declare
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independence and in a very well-documented and dramatic series of events he leaves the continental
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congress in july in late june early july of 1776 and rush is immediately elected to take his place
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and sign so out of nowhere benjamin rush who's certainly well known to all these people
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jefferson comes over to his house adams comes over to his house washington comes over to his house to
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eat they hang out at the city tavern you know he's like their doctor and their philadelphia friend
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during these continental congresses but all of a sudden he's one of them and he signed the
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declaration and we have in his commonplace book exactly what it was like he wrote about what the
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debates were like which is some of the best descriptions we have of the debates of the
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continental congress during 1776 and he quickly makes a name for himself there but he also quickly
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feels that he wants to be helping on the battlefield because as you know the war is starting to come
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closer to pennsylvania so you know they got their butts kicked in new york the british are sort of coming
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down through new jersey and rush wants to be there so in the fall late fall of 1776 he leaves the
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congress so that he can go treat patients on the battlefield and help as a doctor so and the great
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value of this for us narratively is that he's with washington at the banks of the delaware the night
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before washington crosses the delaware and our descriptions of what washington was thinking that night
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these really famous images of washington writing victory or death on little pieces of paper these all
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come from russia's commonplace books and from and from letters that he wrote because he was with
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washington washington sent orders with him back to the different groups you know there were four groups
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along the delaware they were different state militias so rush went from washington's group back
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to the pennsylvania militia with orders that washington gave him and through rush's writing and through
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looking at all the details of this you could actually recreate what it was like not only for
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washington's crossing but for the other groups crossing and that you know that's what i really tried to do
00:24:13.560
it tried to make even the crossing of the delaware something more of like what was it like for
00:24:17.900
everybody because you know the crossing the delaware delaware's not that wide but it was frozen so there
00:24:23.700
was a lot of big ice flows and of course they were taking things they were floating horses across the
00:24:28.040
delaware and they were floating cannons across the delaware like on barges and rafts so this is none of
00:24:33.640
this is easy but we have great descriptions of it and rush crosses he's with the troops he goes to
00:24:39.300
trenton he takes care of troops that were treated at the battle of trenton then he goes to princeton
00:24:44.260
where he went to college and the battle of princeton is on and just ending and he is caring for patients
00:24:50.240
on the main grounds of princeton where he went to school and the british had been in in the chapel
00:24:56.800
where he had taken lots of his classes so it's incredibly powerful and and also at the same time his
00:25:02.540
father-in-law richard stockton was kidnapped by the british so he also was waiting to see if his
00:25:09.860
father-in-law was dead so it's very dramatic and rush just gives you it's like everything you already
00:25:15.840
knew about this stuff plus the way i think of it is like rush had another camera running in many of the
00:25:21.880
events of the revolutionary war and like no one realized the film didn't get developed for hundreds
00:25:26.140
of years so rush is always giving you just sort of a different perspective on this but he's
00:25:31.380
he's getting more and more involved in the war and he's also ultimately less and less involved in
00:25:36.780
pennsylvania politics so he gets voted out of office after all these experiences in war and then he's
00:25:42.380
immediately made surgeon general of the middle department which is the biggest department in the
00:25:46.840
war in the spring of 1777 the problem being he's perfect for this job but his boss is william
00:25:54.140
ship and jr his old mentor tour mentor from philadelphia who hates his guts and so in fact they
00:26:02.060
are fighting about everything all the time one of the things that rush does at this time to make sure
00:26:06.560
that his ideas get out there is he writes a very powerful medical treatise about taking care of soldiers
00:26:13.620
during war which became the first important piece of writing about medical about war medicine and what
00:26:20.900
was really interesting about it is it's not so much about what you do on the battlefield it's about
00:26:25.380
preventive medicine because rush believed very much that they didn't have anywhere near the kind
00:26:30.000
of treatments that they needed and you know many of the injuries that they had where people's arms
00:26:33.880
are being blown off i mean all they could do is amputate but what he believed was that hospitals
00:26:38.860
were dangerous places full of infection and that what was really important was for to do preventive
00:26:44.920
medicine with soldiers really simple things i mean this seems so stupid now but you know
00:26:49.560
soldiers weren't told to go to the bathroom far away from their tents so people got you know
00:26:55.180
dysentery and other infections because of stuff like that rush had to tell them to do that he also
00:27:00.220
popularized the the crew cut you know the army crew cut in america by explaining how keeping your hair
00:27:06.260
short would be healthier and so this was the thing that he wrote he actually published it in the
00:27:11.120
newspaper and then george washington later had it printed and given to all the soldiers we're going to
00:27:16.240
take a quick break for a word from our sponsors
00:27:19.560
and now back to the show yeah rush early on he recognized that most people in war most soldiers
00:27:25.640
in war died because of disease not because they got exactly and so he yeah he played a big role i mean
00:27:31.620
he like people like whenever you think about war you always think about the guns and the cannons
00:27:36.060
but the medicine like if you if you have six soldiers like you're not gonna you're not gonna win
00:27:41.260
and so he i mean like he played a big role in helping the americans win the war
00:27:45.380
he did and but he and he also got thrown out one because he and ship and fought about everything
00:27:51.120
but two he was obsessively concerned that the government wasn't spending enough money
00:27:56.440
taking care of soldiers and with preventive medicine and then actual hospital medicine
00:28:01.340
and what's ironic is you know one of the biggest turning points in russia's life so he
00:28:05.660
you know 1777 he becomes surgeon general the middle department he lives through a terrible battle
00:28:11.620
of brandy wine america loses every war in the the summer and fall of that year 1777 he's there all
00:28:17.040
of them just watching just horror and then he wants washington to pay more attention to this and to give
00:28:24.720
more money for medical care and so he writes to washington and russia doesn't write back fast enough
00:28:30.360
they're separated because the capital moved and rush is separated from his wife because she's
00:28:35.960
somewhere safe adams is gone and rush could be pretty manic if he wasn't calmed down he's a pretty
00:28:42.160
kind of bipolar guy and he always needed people to reality check him and he there was no reality check
00:28:47.600
on him and so he was so upset that washington wouldn't write back to him and he was hearing from
00:28:54.220
the generals that washington had made some questionable choices and of course they were losing every fight
00:28:59.400
he wrote a very famous letter to patrick henry anonymously basically questioning whether
00:29:06.320
washington's choices were good and whether he was the right guy to go forward with and this was
00:29:12.500
pretty blasphemous for the time he wrote a similar letter to john adams which didn't make any big deal
00:29:18.640
because it just went to john adams we actually discovered a third letter that he wrote to his wife
00:29:23.160
that that is in a library in philadelphia but he clearly was kind of losing it because he felt that he
00:29:29.140
didn't have he wasn't impacting washington's decision making and in fact it just turned out
00:29:34.040
that washington was busy and didn't get back to him because in the time that the rush wrote these
00:29:38.660
letters saying we need more money for medicine and then he freaked out and wrote this letter to patrick
00:29:43.360
henry questioning whether washington was the right guy washington wrote back to him and said he agreed
00:29:48.240
with him and that they would do these kinds of things but it was too late and later patrick henry
00:29:54.940
shared that letter with george washington and george washington never forgave rush for writing
00:30:00.180
that letter because washington had heard all these complaints i mean it was a very complainy time
00:30:05.480
this is you know leading up to valley ford just a tough time in the war but for washington to see
00:30:10.960
in handwriting of somebody who was his friend and rush was his friend at that point and was a former
00:30:16.200
congressman somebody who mattered that he had questioned whether washington was making the right
00:30:20.900
choices washington never forgave him for that and their relationship went from friendly to frenemy
00:30:27.540
and everybody knew it and over the years some people tried to repair the relationship but it was
00:30:32.560
not to be repaired and when washington died he made sure that that letter got into the hands of his
00:30:38.060
biographer so people would know that rush wrote this letter questioning him at the darkest moment and
00:30:44.980
and this impacted rush's life all through the rest of his life because people knew that he and
00:30:48.820
washington were no longer friends all right so after the war rush decides to take a break from
00:30:53.900
political life it was like you said he's kind of manic he's probably not suited his personality is not
00:30:58.180
suited for public life so what did he do instead what did he do with his career well he went back to
00:31:03.700
being a doctor i mean as soon as the british left philadelphia he went home and he tried to build up
00:31:09.720
his practice again he tried to build up also some hospital work and a lot of that had to wait until
00:31:15.560
the war was actually over but then you know when the war was over he became very active he wanted
00:31:20.740
to become not only a powerful doctor but a writer who would help shape the post-war period because his
00:31:28.360
belief was that winning the war was an unbelievable accomplishment but figuring out how to do what to
00:31:33.840
do with this new country was much harder and he wanted to be part of that discussion so he basically
00:31:41.040
wrote things saying like the war's over but it really isn't over because the revolution is just
00:31:45.140
starting and one of the things he wanted to focus on was education so he felt that that if the populist
00:31:52.260
wasn't educated there would be no way they would understand their responsibilities as citizens so he
00:31:57.160
he starts the first rural college in america dickinson college in carlisle he starts that himself
00:32:03.600
he writes out a plan for the first public school systems to be put in place in pennsylvania but is
00:32:09.720
influential all over the country he starts a second college called franklin college which is now
00:32:15.440
franklin and marshall and then he starts writing all these different things that really deal with
00:32:21.040
important issues that he hopes will influence the process of writing the constitution and figuring out
00:32:28.240
how to govern because you know the country is really mushy in terms of what to do after the war so we
00:32:34.640
tend to forget like the period from 1781 until the constitution is signed to us that's just like
00:32:39.920
whatever but that's you know that's like a really dangerous time anything could have happened and so
00:32:45.180
it's very interesting to see what rush did to try to make people think about these big ideas and by the
00:32:50.800
end of that period he he was not on the constitution convention he was there and he he was the leader of
00:32:57.100
the pennsylvania delegation to approve it but he very much had a hand in a lot of these debates
00:33:02.220
and by the time that was all done he had become the most important doctor in america so john morgan who
00:33:09.440
had who had become was the most important doctor died in 1789 rush took over for him and then the
00:33:15.660
the colleges that were in pennsylvania consolidated into the university of pennsylvania and then you have
00:33:22.560
this whole period you know when when philadelphia becomes the capital those 10 years are unbelievably
00:33:27.800
formative for america and obviously unbelievably formative for philadelphia and rush is like
00:33:32.720
the god the medical god of philadelphia the political advisor to everybody he's close friends
00:33:38.940
with adams and jefferson which may not mean anything to us today but that was like being close friends to
00:33:44.500
the top republican and the top democrat and he was he both of them confided in him and he was sort of
00:33:50.380
caught in the middle of them a lot and so his time during that is fascinating and he matters in a huge
00:33:56.980
way to all the players and both in terms of medicine in terms of politics and also just in terms of
00:34:03.660
it's his city you know it's like he's also like the editor of philadelphia magazine so he knows where
00:34:08.800
all the good restaurants are and you know all that kind of stuff so you know abigail adams says like it's
00:34:13.140
such so great to have you know benjamin rush as your friend when you have to live in philadelphia he kind
00:34:17.380
of knows everything and everybody so his his life becomes real different and real fascinating and
00:34:24.700
it's so well documented during this time the letters between him and adams it's well documented
00:34:30.520
until adams comes to town i'll tell you one of the things that kills you as a historian when the
00:34:34.720
characters you love are all in the same town the letters disappear you know so there's all this
00:34:40.400
amazing all these amazing letters between adams and jefferson adams and rush and while adams is
00:34:45.520
overseas and then when adams is in new york during the brief time in the capitals in new york and then
00:34:50.040
as soon as he gets to philadelphia there's like a quiet time and then after he leaves and after the
00:34:55.500
capitol leaves and moves to washington there's tons of letters okay so uh rush after the war he he picks
00:35:01.260
up franklin's mantle of creating voluntary you know toque velian voluntary associations to help this new
00:35:08.900
country develop he called them republican machines right so these individuals well no he called he said the
00:35:13.840
individual people needed to be republican machines right he was talking about that as the personal
00:35:18.500
responsibility of each person to be a machine to fulfill its responsibilities to the new republic right
00:35:25.100
so he's doing that but at the same time he's also building up his medical career but he takes
00:35:29.500
a really keen interest in mental illness um and this was revolutionary for the time a lot of people
00:35:35.960
didn't know what to what to think of mentally ill people but he he's thought that we could cure mentally
00:35:41.720
ill people with with medicine what what was going on there well so basically you know this is a time
00:35:48.120
when medicine is starting to become a little bit more scientific and you know when it comes to mental
00:35:52.700
illness and addiction mental illness and addiction were for many centuries seen as either human weaknesses
00:35:59.220
or failures of faith and you know rush as a doctor knew that neither of those were true and that
00:36:06.760
alcoholism that mental illness depression mania these were medical conditions he assumed that the
00:36:13.700
only way they could be treated if they could be treated was by medicine and it was very important for him
00:36:19.500
to make people understand that we needed to treat the people whose brains were different than ours
00:36:25.180
in a gracious way in a caring way in a medical way and you know because people with mental illness and
00:36:32.200
alcoholism at that time were locked in the basement of pennsylvania hospital they weren't treated they
00:36:36.800
were just like jailed you know to keep them from hurting other people and people were allowed to come
00:36:42.580
and pay to look at them right you see these images in movies all the time it's horrible they also
00:36:48.140
weren't heated these cells because the belief at the time was that people with mental illness couldn't
00:36:52.660
feel cold so in the 1780s rush took this on he knew it would be hard but at the same time he also
00:36:59.540
provided a place to take care of people so as i said to you you know pennsylvania hospital was for
00:37:04.460
poor people except for the part of it that was for people with mental illness because those people
00:37:09.080
couldn't be taken care of at home so rush was treating both people who lived on the street who
00:37:15.220
were brought into the hospital and he treated some of the children of the founding fathers he
00:37:19.580
eventually in the 1790s forced them to build a second building only for people who had mental illness
00:37:25.700
and addiction and so the pennsylvania hospital which is still there you can still tour it but you know
00:37:30.700
the original eighth street building had cells in the basement he forced them to build a mirror building
00:37:35.240
on ninth street only for people with mental illness and addiction and he began writing down what happened
00:37:40.820
there you know the beginnings of talk therapy the beginnings of occupational therapy all happened
00:37:46.200
there and the irony the utter irony of this is he does this for decades and then his eldest son who's a
00:37:52.880
physician who's interested in this things too his master's thesis was about suicidality
00:37:58.440
becomes mentally ill has a huge psychotic break tries to kill himself many times and ends up being
00:38:05.460
rush's patient so this is the doctor who rush expected to take over his practice instead he had a psychotic
00:38:11.680
break in his last late 20s after killing his best friend in a duel and he ended up being rush's patient
00:38:19.740
and he lived the rest of his life at pennsylvania hospital in the new mental illness wards that rush
00:38:26.820
had created so the behind the scenes stories you know just as they are today people don't talk enough
00:38:32.700
about how alcohol how other addictions how mental illness affects life but it certainly does you know
00:38:39.660
the biggest thing that happened in john adams his life was that his son died of alcoholism it's not
00:38:44.280
something that people talk about a lot but i guarantee you that that's was a huge thing that hung over john
00:38:49.020
adams so you know people were never afraid to talk to rush about these things because they knew
00:38:53.440
he understood and that he believed there was a medical approach even though look as then as today
00:38:59.540
it's really hard to treat people with mental illness there's no silver bullet there's no easy way to make
00:39:04.120
it all go away so uh in 1793 there was a yellow fever epidemic in philadelphia yes and yellow yellow fever
00:39:12.980
is awful like you you get it and you kind of have a headache and then maybe some nausea but when it gets
00:39:17.400
bad your skin starts turning yellow you get jaundiced you start vomiting blood it was awful
00:39:23.060
they didn't know what what spread it it's mosquitoes right that's what spreads yellow fever yeah but it
00:39:27.600
was a hundred years after that before they learned that so so rush you know most most of everyone in
00:39:32.480
philadelphia they left they got out of town it's like we're gonna get out of this out of philadelphia
00:39:36.740
rush he stays there and he's just treating patients and despite the fact that he could be you know come
00:39:42.580
down with yellow fever at any moment what was his role in the yellow fever epidemic
00:39:47.400
so the yellow fever look there had been yellow fever before but there never been an epidemic like
00:39:52.380
the one in philadelphia in 1793 and again remember philadelphia was the u.s capital at that time so
00:39:57.760
the people who were fleeing were like george washington and people like that so ironically the
00:40:03.440
yellow fever epidemic came right on the heels of rush had been working with the black clergy in
00:40:07.820
philadelphia to build the first free black church and they just had this dinner to celebrate the roof
00:40:13.420
raising of the first free black church which was fascinating because all the white people who helped
00:40:18.600
with it they were served by the black members of the community and by the clergy and then they got up
00:40:23.840
and served the black members of the community it's such an amazing scene that rush actually writes about
00:40:29.980
to his wife and it would have been so great for people to be able to hold on to that wonderful feeling
00:40:35.500
but yellow fever came immediately afterwards and yellow fever was both a medical challenge and a
00:40:41.740
racial challenge sadly because what happened was the black clergy who rush was close with volunteered to
00:40:48.220
help when all the doctors left they did it i think primarily because it was the right thing to do
00:40:54.560
the medical literature actually said that they were less likely to get the illness but i honestly i don't
00:40:59.300
think they cared about that they cared about helping and it turned out within weeks they knew that the
00:41:03.960
medical literature was wrong and everybody got it the same but you know 10 of the population of
00:41:08.980
philadelphia died in three months and philadelphia was the biggest city in the country at that point
00:41:13.660
every treatment that people gave didn't work and what we know from going through covid is that when
00:41:21.340
smart doctors and dumb doctors don't know what to do and nothing works they just take off after each other
00:41:27.860
and then that leaves us all the sick people just even more freaked out and that's exactly what
00:41:33.460
happened here and it got political you know alexander hamilton announced that he had been cured of the
00:41:40.320
yellow fever by his doctor who didn't like rush so he published his thing his treatment which rush knew
00:41:46.780
didn't work and then rush went after him it's it's all politicized it's all a mess it's actually
00:41:53.020
extremely well documented we have all of rush's letters that he wrote almost every day we have rush's
00:41:58.420
letters from his wife back to him she's in princeton with their kids scared to death that she's never going to
00:42:03.280
see her husband again their friends are dropping like flies every day every treatment they do doesn't
00:42:09.120
work so rush keeps increasing he does more bloodletting he doubles the bloodletting he doubles the calomel he
00:42:15.800
doubles the bark which are all the things that you treat people during this night nothing works
00:42:19.940
rush got yellow fever himself as did richard allen one of the two pastors who was involved in the care
00:42:25.900
luckily they both lived many of rush's staff died rush's sister who stayed in town to take care of him
00:42:31.880
she died of it and it's just it's unbelievably horrible and it's unbelievably knowable because
00:42:39.180
we have all this all the writings of it so you can know what happened during those those days
00:42:44.000
at a very close level so there's a there's a lot to read about the yellow fever epidemic and i i do fear
00:42:50.620
that people have strong opinions about it without knowing that much about it the more you go into its
00:42:56.120
history the more you learn not only about medicine but just about american politics because this is also
00:43:01.720
the birthplace of american partisanship you know a lot of american partisanship was created
00:43:07.760
by alexander hamilton in 1791 234 this is when the parties split this is when there came to be a
00:43:16.480
republican and democratic version of everything and you know it's probably a natural process but this is
00:43:23.420
when it happened and yellow fever contributed to that too so i would only urge people when they read about
00:43:29.080
this and i i hope you do read about it to see it as a as a medical phenomenon and see it as a political
00:43:35.000
and an american phenomenon because we are replaying a lot of these things today yeah i thought it was
00:43:40.460
funny hamilton you know he wrote that thing about his his cure they called it the federalist cure it was
00:43:45.140
the federalist cure yeah and but like some people thought it was a little too weenie right it wasn't
00:43:48.760
enough it was like it's kind of wussy and so you need to do it was nothing right it was nothing the
00:43:52.900
treatment was like let them sit there and give them water right and then there's like the democratic
00:43:56.380
republican cure where it's a little you had to be a little more aggressive with this thing um
00:44:00.320
yeah i mean it's as i read this it's like this is just this is a deja vu like this more things
00:44:06.260
change the more they stay the same yep yeah america you know the thing that's fascinating and i never
00:44:11.340
realized it until i did this book america was america the minute it began and everything we think
00:44:17.960
that came because of oh this technology or this world war this kind of stuff it's just all
00:44:23.240
incrementalism from the beginning i find that actually comforting yeah i do too because i because
00:44:29.440
i think in every era there are people who think oh we broke this thing you know it was really good
00:44:34.260
until we broke it by doing this or doing that but in fact the fissures were there from the very
00:44:40.340
beginning and they are part of the country and they're okay but you have to as long as you look
00:44:47.220
at the founders and you don't see the founders as people who didn't think that if you look at the
00:44:51.080
founders and think that they didn't think that you are not reading the founders closely enough
00:44:55.040
all right so after the yellow fever epidemic rush survived he spent the rest of his life
00:45:00.520
still doing some doctor work but then he's devoted a lot of time to reconnecting john adams and thomas
00:45:06.500
jefferson because they became estranged why did rush think that was important to do well you know first
00:45:12.620
of all you know rush in a way never recovered from the yellow fever epidemic it became a thing that hung
00:45:17.920
over him for years it really hurt his business it hurt his popularity john adams had to give him a
00:45:24.040
job at the u.s mint so he could have money because his practice was so hurt by the politics of yellow fever
00:45:31.020
so it was really rough and then of course the u.s capital left philadelphia which rush was crushed by
00:45:36.460
it went to washington so when adams lost to jefferson in the 18 the election of 1800 which was unbelievably
00:45:43.920
contentious unbelievably contentious the two of them didn't speak for years and adams left washington
00:45:50.620
in a huff went back home was unbelievably depressed russian jefferson stayed in some contact but
00:45:57.060
russian adams were out of contact for five years and these are guys who used to talk every day and
00:46:03.260
when they were apart they would write to each other all the time and then after five years adams sends
00:46:09.500
rush a letter and he just says like you know before one of us dies we should talk again and this letter
00:46:16.680
triggers this unbelievable flurry of events which are a lot of the reason we really understand the
00:46:23.160
american revolution and here's why so when this letter was sent in 1905 adams and jefferson had not
00:46:29.320
spoken in five years and you can argue that adams jefferson created this country you know the
00:46:34.840
intellectual the basis of this country adams and jefferson created it rush certainly felt that he
00:46:40.740
felt that the dissolution of their friendship was an unbelievably dangerous thing for america
00:46:45.920
that if adams and jefferson could be torn apart by partisanship what did that mean for the rest of
00:46:51.400
the country if the guys who invented the intellectual underpinnings of the country couldn't talk to each
00:46:56.740
other even after all this stuff so he was fascinated to be back in touch with adams his letters back and
00:47:03.700
forth to adams are very much sort of treatment for adams's depression but they're also just an amazing
00:47:09.420
back and forth between two founders talking later in their lives about was it all worth it and what
00:47:14.560
did we do and what should happen next you know and a lot of what we understand about the american
00:47:18.880
revolution doesn't come from the real-time writing when it was happening it comes from these later
00:47:23.320
letters which are unbelievably detailed and fascinating so these go on for a number of years and part of what
00:47:29.200
rush starts seeing is that he understands the part of what this letter writing can be is that he maybe
00:47:34.680
can get adams and jefferson back together so you see in these letters to adams the beginnings of this
00:47:40.800
sort of again it's founding father family therapy it's like what do i have to do to get adams to think
00:47:45.920
about that he and jefferson should be friends again and he starts doing it with jefferson too and we have
00:47:51.320
all these letters so you know he also during this time jefferson makes him the medical person for
00:47:57.340
lewis and clark so lewis comes to philadelphia rush tells him what to do before lewis and clark goes
00:48:02.280
out so rush and jefferson are back and forth but he gets it in his head that these letters can be the
00:48:08.420
reason that adams and jefferson get back together and for years then he starts sort of saying to them
00:48:13.640
like you guys could still be friends you know don't you miss each other you know it's some of it's real
00:48:19.080
high school stuff you know he's like you know i heard from a friend in boston that adams says he still
00:48:23.460
loves you i mean i'm serious this is like what some of the stuff is the letters are so unbelievably
00:48:28.000
personal they're great you can understand why adams jefferson didn't want anybody to see them
00:48:31.880
and finally in 1812 so again so these adams jefferson haven't talked in 12 years and rush
00:48:37.860
has been on adams for seven years to interact with jefferson and they finally write to each other
00:48:44.800
and they finally rekindle their friendship only because of rush and you know this is fascinating
00:48:51.260
because you know rush is much younger than them and rush is doing this because he's afraid one of
00:48:55.420
them will die before their relationship is rekindled and rush only lives another year
00:49:01.040
and they live another 13 years right so they end up dying you know in 1826 and we then have
00:49:10.180
letters between them from 1812 through 1826 that are remarkably in-depth that go over many aspects of
00:49:17.220
the american revolution that we otherwise wouldn't know because rush started this letter writing thing
00:49:22.380
and after rush died rush's son richard who was in the government was in the letter writing too as was
00:49:27.760
of course john quincy adams adams's son because you know rush's son and adams's son are the only
00:49:34.060
founding father's sons who mattered in the u.s government so john quincy adams obviously became
00:49:39.740
president richard rush was attorney general he was secretary of state he was john quincy adams's
00:49:45.560
vice presidential candidate the last time john quincy adams ran and lost but they were they were
00:49:51.660
lifelong friends so the interactions between rush adams and jefferson while they're all alive and
00:49:58.060
then after rush dies between adams and jefferson john quincy and richard rush are the basis of a lot
00:50:05.400
of our understanding of how the founders look back on the american revolution and the retelling
00:50:11.060
of some of the stories that some of them we didn't know before some of them just there's a different
00:50:15.860
version of them in these letters they're so interesting and they're so human and they're
00:50:21.080
ultimately just two friends and again these guys never saw each other right adams and rush never saw
00:50:27.000
each other after the capital left in 1800 and jefferson and adams never saw each other either this was a
00:50:32.640
friendship completely through letters over decades and it is the basis of so much of our understanding of
00:50:40.440
the american revolution it's amazing so after researching and studying and writing about
00:50:45.060
rush's life and you know spending so much time with him are there any lessons you've taken from him
00:50:49.740
a lot oh a lot i mean first of all you know i never understood how fascinating and personal the
00:50:56.460
american revolution was and how close it was to not happening right i just i just don't think that
00:51:02.260
anybody ever tried to explain to me the real human drama of the period leading up to the war and the war
00:51:08.440
itself and the period after the war and the writing of the constitution and just the creation of a
00:51:12.880
government and the movement of the government up through the war of 1812 and with rush you get
00:51:17.780
basically you know everything he died in 1813 so you get up through the war of 1812 his son is in
00:51:23.540
washington during the war of 1812 and he and adams are talking about this because it's like richard's
00:51:28.160
there why is he you know doing this and putting himself in danger so you really get to see
00:51:32.820
the early years of america and especially what's interesting is this is the time when american
00:51:37.160
history wasn't taken seriously by americans you know i mean independence hall wasn't called
00:51:42.320
independence hall until the 1820s when lafayette came back and and started they started talking
00:51:48.180
about american history because america had been around long enough that they could think about
00:51:52.140
its history you know independence hall was going to be knocked down the liberty bell was going to be
00:51:55.980
melted because no one thought that any of it was that interesting so as america became a real
00:52:02.240
country that was going to last which they all weren't sure it would then people started
00:52:06.820
understanding that its history was going to matter and so i feel like i've met a really human
00:52:12.640
version of the american history of this country and i'm really grateful to have it one and two
00:52:18.440
it really you know i did a lot of this stuff during the last years of the obama administration
00:52:23.120
and during the trump administration that's what i was writing and you know it's really important
00:52:28.220
when your country is tearing itself apart to understand the history of that and to be able
00:52:33.820
to put it in context and to know that it's horrible but it's not that new and it's american
00:52:39.560
and it is in america to survive it and you learn that from rush and alizander hamilton screaming at each
00:52:48.440
other on the streets of philadelphia in 1791 you learn you know you learn that from the fact that this
00:52:53.460
country was built on people screaming at each other and so that i have to say i found very comforting
00:52:59.300
and i've also just found rush really interesting to me for everything that i learned about him
00:53:03.300
i've learned many more things since the book came out i mean rush's story wasn't that well documented we
00:53:09.000
did i hope a pretty good job in the book uh but we've continued to do research we put up a with pen
00:53:14.960
we built a benjamin rush portal so that people could get easy access to everything that rush wrote
00:53:19.920
that's digitized and we've actually been working with the uh national archives and with university
00:53:25.800
of virginia rotunda press to try to get rush's letters to be all available for free so people
00:53:31.360
can read them and read his autobiography because they're key parts of the american story and a lot
00:53:36.620
of people don't know where to go read them they've seen the quotes from them but i've read a lot of
00:53:42.320
history books by well-known historians where they're quoting secondary sources on things that are in
00:53:47.440
rush's writing i assume because they can't get a copy of the original piece so we're trying to get
00:53:53.300
people so they can access rush's actual letters rush's actual commonplace books rush's actual
00:53:58.960
memoir and see what he wrote to be able to put those things in the proper perspective but i must say
00:54:04.160
it's not just because because yellow fever covid made yellow fever seem really interesting and
00:54:09.460
politics made uh you know a lot of rush things seem really interesting you know rush is just a
00:54:14.460
different way of seeing american history and i think a comforting way the way i think of it is
00:54:18.760
this you know rush wasn't a politician he was a doctor so politicians see problems differently than
00:54:25.720
doctors do i think politicians see problems as things that if they pass a law the problem will go away
00:54:31.260
and doctors know that isn't true that in every generation disease comes and that their jobs do the
00:54:38.520
best job they can and to innovate within that and to see the history of the country through the eyes
00:54:43.940
of a physician who is a politician second rather than somebody who's a politician or a businessman
00:54:49.940
first is a real different way to see the country and i find it to be a more comforting way to see the
00:54:55.960
country well steven this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more about your work
00:55:00.140
well you know the book is called rush it's it's anywhere you want to find it i have a website at
00:55:05.420
www.stevenfried.com s-t-e-p-h-e-n-f-r-i-e-d.com and uh links to all the other stuff that that i do come
00:55:14.640
from that website and you know i would just encourage you you know read about rush get
00:55:19.400
interested in whatever entry point he is interesting for you because he it's over a long period of time
00:55:24.780
there's lots of different subjects that he gets you to but each of them brings you a better
00:55:29.320
understanding of the country you live in now and how it got to where it is all right well steven
00:55:34.360
freed thanks for your time it's been a pleasure thank you my guest today was steven freed he's
00:55:39.160
the author of the book rush revolution madness and the visionary doctor who became a founding father
00:55:43.860
it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can find more information about
00:55:46.860
his work at his website stevenfried.com also check out our show notes at awm.is slash rush we find links
00:55:54.460
well that wraps up another edition of the awm podcast make sure to check out our website at
00:56:05.360
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00:56:34.620
remind you i listen to anyone podcast but put what you've heard into action