The New Method of Inoculating for the Small Pox; Delivered in a Lecture in the University of Philadelphia, Feb. 20th, 1781

Benjamin Rush. The New Method of Inoculating for the Small Pox; Delivered in a Lecture in the University of Philadelphia, Feb. 20th, 1781. Philadelphia: Charles Cist, 1781.

Benjamin Rush, the foremost American physician of his time, was born in Philadelphia in 1846. He was a man of many talents with interests in enlightenment philosophy, education, public health, and politics, as well as medicine. A signer of the Declaration of Independence, Rush was a social reformer, an abolitionist, and a proponent of public libraries and education. His medical output consisted of treatises on psychiatry, yellow fever, hygiene, and bloodletting, as well as smallpox and other diseases.

By his death in 1813, Rush had left a complicated legacy. His revolutionary approach to public health had helped gain American independence, and it had helped the new country transform into an urbanized society. Nonetheless, as the foremost proponent of “heroic medicine,” Rush’s advocacy for unnecessary intervention sparked a uniquely American backlash. In the early 19th century, these interventions, such as bloodletting, mercury chloride, and toxic emetics, were increasingly condemned by Rush’s critics as barbaric. New, supposedly gentler and more natural approaches, such as Thomsonian herbalism, gained in popularity. While it took most of the rest of the century for bloodletting and calomel to fall entirely out of favor, much of today’s public health infrastructure owes its beginnings to Rush’s efforts.