Name/Title
Medical Inquiries and Observations. To Which Is Added an Appendix, Containing Observations on the Duties of a Physician, and the Methods of Improving Medicine.Description
RUSH, Benjamin. Medical Inquiries and Observations. To Which Is Added an Appendix, Containing Observations on the Duties of a Physician, and the Methods of Improving Medicine. London: Reprinted for C. Dilly, 1789. 2nd ed. [1st English ed.]. 261pp.
[with] Medical Inquiries and Observations, Volume II. Phila.: Printed by T. Dobson, 1793. 1st ed. [2],iv,321, [1, errata] pp.
[with] An Account of the Bilious Remitting Yellow Fever, as It Appeared in the City of Philadelphia, in the Year 1793. Phila.:printed by Thomas Dobson, 1794. 2nd ed. [same format and year as the 1st ed.]. x,363pp.
[with] Medical Inquiries and Observations: Containing an Account of the Bilious Remitting and Intermitting Yellow Fever, as It Appeared in Philadelphia in the Year 1794. Together with an Inquiry into the Proximate Cause of Fever; and a Defence of Bloodletting as a Remedy for Certain Diseases ... Volume IV. Phila.: Printed by Thomas Dobson, 1796. 1st ed. vii,[1] [viii]-ix,258pp.
[with] Medical Inquiries and observations: Containing an Account of the Yellow Fever, as It Appeared in Philadelphia in 1797, and Observations upon the Nature and Cure of the Gout, and Hydrophobia ... Volume V. Phila: Printed by Budd and Bartram, for Thomas Dobson, 1798. 1st ed. xii, 236 pp. 5 Vols.
Orig. paper-backed boards. Spines chipped, spine, corners, and boards worn, light scattered foxing, some very old water stains, some boards loose, some scattered in obtrusive library blind stamps, else a very good set. In two cloth folding boxes.
Rare; no set of the 18th-century edition has come up to auction since 1955 (which was also a mixed set). Even individual volumes are rare.
"Rush was considered the ablest American clinician of his time. He was a friend of Benjamin Franklin and one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence. His many writings are distinguished for their classical style ... Rush probably had more influence on American medicine than any other single man."--Garrison and Morton, 80. The first two volumes consist of essays covering a wide variety of subjects, such as the history of medicine among the indians, the climate of Pennsylvania, diseases prevalent during the Revolution, the effects of spirits on the mind and body, old age, the duties of the physician, as well as observations on such diseases as pulmonary consumption, dropsy, gout, hydrophobia, measles, and influenza. Volumes Three, four, and Five are almost entirely devoted to Rush's writings concerning the yellow fever. Rush's description of dengue, "bilious remitting fever," is one of the first important accounts of the disease.
Volume 1 Contains:
1. An Inquiry into the Natural History of Medicine among the Indians of North America, and a Comparative View of their Diseases and Remedies with those of Civilized Nations
2. An Account of the Climate 85-Pennsylvania and its Influence upon the Human Body.
3. An Account of the Bilious Remitting Fever, as it Appeared in Philadel in the Summer and Autumn of the year 1780
4. An Account of the Scarlatina Anginosa, as it Appeared in Philadelphia, t the Years 1783 and 1784
5. Additional Observations upon the Scarlatina Anginosa
6. An Inquiry into the Cause and Cure of the Cholera Infantum
7. Observations on the Cynanche Trachaelis
8. An Account of the Effects of Blisters and Bleeding in the Cure of Obstinate Intermitting Fevers
9. An Account of the Disorder Occasioned by Drinking Cold Water in Warm Weather, and the Method of Curing it
10. An Account of the Efficacy of Common Salt in the Cure of Hamoptysis
11. Free Thoughts upon the Cause and Cure of the Pulmonary Consumption
12. Observations upon Worms in the Alimentary Canal and upon Anthelmintic Medicines
13. An Account of the External Use of Arsenic in the Cure of Cancers
14. Observations upon the cause and cure of the Tetanus
15. Additional Observations on the Tetanus and Hydrophobia
16. The Result of Observations Made upon the Diseases which Occurred in the Military Hospitals of the United States, during the Late War
17. An Account of the Influence of the Military and Political Events of the American Revolution upon the Human Body
18. An Inquiry into the Relation of Tastes and Ailments to Each Other; and into the Influence of this Relation upon Health and Pleasure
19. Appendix: Containing, the New Method of Inoculating for the Small-Pox.
Delivered in a Lecture in the University of Pennsylvania, on the 20th of February, 1781; Also, Observations on the Duties of a Physician, and the Methods of Improving Medicine, Accommodated to the Present State of Society and Manners in the United States. Delivered in the University of Pennsylvania, on the 7th of February 1789 ("Observations on the Duties" was published twice more in the same year, see Fox 1789-7 and 1789-22)Other Names and Numbers
Other Number
Austin 1660. Evans 22123, 26112, 27659, 31144, 34496. Fox 1789-17Condition
Notes
Orig. paper-backed boards. Spines chipped, spine, corners, and boards worn, light scattered foxing, some very old waterstains, some boards loose, some scattered in obtrusive library blindstamps, else a very good set. In two cloth folding boxes.General Notes
Note Type
Historical NoteNote
Sometime in 1786 Rush determined or as he would have it, "my partyinen have applied to me"-to publish a collection of his literary and noal esays written since he had returned from Burope in 1770. He told fatom of the project in June, sending along a table of contents and asking So friend to handle all the negotiations involved in getting it published in Imon. On 26 August 1787 he told Mrs. Kush the volume would go to te pinter the next day, and that it would be dedicated to Cullen. For asns never explained, more than a year and a half passed before the wane, which ended up being dedicated to Redman, was printed," Medical Inquiries and Observations, as Rush entitled the volume, wie forth carly in 1789 as the first larger-than-pamphlet-size collection d medical ossays by an American physician published in the United States. irporated nearly everything Rush had previously published on medical maters and several pieces he had been unable to have printed, Like all shers, he believed his work to be a bold and radical venture. The essays, he da is vile, "contain more new opinions in medicine than ever 1 have Wished in morals or metaphysics." Every one of them, he thought, chal-koal some acepted medical clich. Only in his account of the Revolu-troi fictor the human body did he think he wrote something acceptable to all his colleagues, “as it opposes no popular prejudice.” He expected great opposition to the essay on worms, which he had never before been able to get published, and to the one that called for exercise and fresh e for consumptives. "In all of these," he said with a touch of santino,
"truth and utility, not novelty or fame, have been the sole objects of ag inquiries." He wrote, he might have added, for laymen as well as co-leagues, for he had always held that medicine was not an occult an is which only the practitioners could talk with one another 36
Medical Inquiries and Observations was published in January, l February Rush concluded his chemistry course for the year-and forever it turned out, though he would not know this for several months-with a le ture on the duties of a physician and his means for improving medicine." He directed the talk particularly to those in the class who would eventual have a country practice, doubtless the large majority. They were advised to settle on a farm. A farm, he said, will promote a sense of equality amo. your patients and "prevent envy"; it "will serve your country," for you ca use your knowledge of chemistry to advance agriculture; it will protit you with plenty of exercise and thus distract you from drinking grog.
Rush passed out the usual advice physicians had been handing students for centuries. "Take care of the poor.... Go regularly to some par of worship... Avoid intimacies with your patients if possible, and not them only in sickness.... Never dispute about a bill.... Never make light (to a patient) of any case."
He gave out a few tricks of the trade. "Dont insert trifing advice or services in a bill," he warned, "You can incorporate them with important matters such as pleurisy or the reduction of a bone" Charge what the traffic will bear "let the number and time of your visit, the nature of your patient's disease, and his rank in his family or society, determine the figures in your accounts" -and "the sooner you send in your accounts after your patients recover, the better." He pointed out traps to avoid. Refuse, "especially in the forenoon," he said, the drink of strong liquor invariably offered on visits or you may be "innocently led by it into habits of drunkenness."
Once a path had been cleared through the homilies Rush had some original things to say. Listen to old wives' tales, for their homemade reme dies often cure where physicians fail. Quacks-medical quacks, at least, as opposed to quacks in law-can also teach, for out of their temerity hare come "many of our most useful remedies." Admittedly Franz Mesmer was a quack, but "the facts which he has established clearly prove the infuence of the imagination, and will, upon disease," Rush said. "Iet us avail ourselves of the handle which those faculties of the mind present to us, in the strife between life and death." At another point he held it the duty of physicians to rescue metaphysics, or "the anatomy of the human mind" as he preferred to call it, from academics and theologians. "It can only be perfected by the aid and discoveries of medicine," he said.
He ended with a plea to put medicine like government on an American footing. Field and forest should be searched for indigenous medicines.
"Who knows but that, at the foot of the Allegheny Mountains there blooms a flower that is an infallible cure for the epilepsy? Perhaps on the Monongahela or the Potomac there may grow a root that shall supply by its tonic powers the invigorating effects of the savage or military life in the cure of consumptions." That hopeful note was sustained to the rousing per-oration: "All the doors and windows of the temple of nature have been thrown open by the convulsions of the late American Revolution. This is the time, therefore, to press upon her altars."
"Benjamin Rush: Revolutionary Gadfly. By David Freeman Hawke. (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1971. pp 377-379