RUSH
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RUSH
academy kept by the Rev. Samuel Finley,
later president of Princeton College, at
Nottingham, he entered Princeton, where
he received the degree B . A. in 1760.
He spent the subsequent six years as an
apprentice to Dr. John Redman, one of
the most prominent physicians of Phila-
delphia, and during this time translated
the "Aphorisms of Hippocrates" into
English and kept a medical notebook
from which was suljsequently derived
the only account written by an eye-
witness, of the yellow-fever epidemic
which occurred in 1762 in Philadelphia.
He also was one of the ten pupils who
attended the first course of lectures on
anatomy given by Dr. William Ship-
pen, Jr.
In 1766 he entered the medical school of Edinburgh University and took his M. D. there in 1768, his graduation thesis being called " De Coctione Ciborum in Ventriculo." Thacher says it was written in classic Latin, and adds quaintly "and I have reason to believe without the help of a grinder of theses." While he was at Edinburgh, Pres. Finley, of Princeton College, died, and the trustees elected the celebrated Dr. Witherspoon, of Paisley in Scotland, as his successor. The latter at first declined the appointment, but the trustees appointed young Rush as their deputy, and liis solicitations at length prevailed on the eminent Scotchman to accept the position. From Edinburgh, Rush went to London and from thence to France to study, returning to Philadelphia in 1769. In the same year he was elected professor of chemistry in the college of Philadel- phia, thereby rendering complete the medical faculty of the first medical school established in what is now the United States. The other teachers were John Morgan, William Shippen, Jr., and Adam Kuhn. Clinical lectures in asso- ciation with their teaching were also given at the Pennsylvania Hospital by Dr. Thomas Bond.
Upon the death of Dr. John Morgan in 1789, Rush succeeded him as professor of the theory and practice of medicine in
the College of Philadelphia. When, in
1791, that institution was merged with
the University of the State of Pennsyl-
vania to form the University of Penn-
sylvania, Dr. Rush was appointed pro-
fessor of the institutes of medicine and
clinical medicine. In addition to his
public teaching Dr. P^ush had a large
number of private students, and it has
been estimated that in the course of the
forty-four years in which he was actively
engaged in teaching he instructed 2,250
pupils. His lectures, judging from the
notebook of his pupils and from the state-
ments of those who heard them, were
models of lucidity and comprehensive-
ness. He had the gift of imparting to
his students some share of his own
wonderful enthusiasm and thirst for
knowledge. The prevalent medical
teaching of his day was that of Cullen.
Diseases were classified and every disease
was supposed to possess an appropriate
specific treatment. Underlying princi-
ples were entirely disregarded in an
effort to build up a purely artificial classi-
fication of diseases and their treatment.
Rush attacked the prevalent theories of
medicine at once. He proclaimed the
importance of the principles upon which
a correct knowledge of the practice of
medicine could only be based. "In his
public instructions, the name of the dis-
ease is comparatively nothing, but its
nature everything. His system rejects
the nosological arrangement of diseases,
and places all their numerous forms in
morbid excitement, induced by irritants,
acting upon previous debility. It rejects,
likewise, all prescriptions for the names
of diseases, and by directing their appli-
cation wholly to the forming and fluctu-
ating state of diseases, and of the system,
derives from a few active medicines all
the advantages which have been in vain
expected from the numerous articles
which compose European treatises upon
the materia medica. This simple ar-
rangement was further simplified by
considering every morbid state of the
system to be of such as neither required
depletion or stimulation."
