Physician

Reformer.

American patriot, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and between 1769 and 1791 professor of chemistry and medicine at the College of Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania Medical School), Benjamin Rush was the best-known physician of the era. Born near Philadelphia in 1745, he was educated at Edinburgh, Scotland, considered the best medical school of the eighteenth century. He started practicing medicine in his home city in 1769. The next year he wrote Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on Chemistry, the first chemistry textbook in America. Rush was a deeply religious man who took a strict moral view of the issues of the day. To this active reformer, health was very much a moral issue, and he was an outspoken critic of slavery, drinking, and tobacco. Rush was the first doctor to publicly associate smoking with cancer.

Public Servant.

Between 1777 and 1778 Rush served as surgeon...