Dr. Benjamin Rush
The Founding Father Who Healed a Wounded Nation
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- USD 17.99
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- USD 17.99
Descripción editorial
A gripping, often startling biography of the Founding Father of an America that other Founding Fathers forgot--an America of women, African Americans, Jews, Roman Catholics, Quakers, indentured workers, the poor, the mentally ill, and war veterans
Ninety percent of Americans could not vote and did not enjoy rights to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness when our Founding Fathers proclaimed, "all men are created equal." Alone among those who signed the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush heard the cries of those other, deprived Americans and stepped forth as the nation's first great humanitarian and social reformer.
Remembered primarily as America's leading, most influential physician, Rush led the Founding Fathers in calling for abolition of slavery, equal rights for women, improved medical care for injured troops, free health care for the poor, slum clearance, citywide sanitation, an end to child labor, free universal public education, humane treatment and therapy for the mentally ill, prison reform, and an end to capital punishment.
Using archival material from Edinburgh, London, Paris, and Philadelphia, as well as significant new materials from Rush's descendants and historical societies, Harlow Giles Unger's new biography restores Benjamin Rush to his rightful place in American history as the Founding Father of modern American medical care and psychiatry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Unger (Henry Clay: America's Greatest Statesman) offers a useful biography of a lesser-known Founding Father, but his treatment of his subject lacks the nuance and depth of Stephen Fried's superior offering, Rush: Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father. Unger walks readers through the main points of Rush's life, starting with his medical education in Scotland and his early career as a doctor in Philadelphia. The author's choices about how much attention to pay to certain events are not always logical; for example, he spends about as much space on medical pioneer Galen's basis for believing that bloodletting was beneficial as on Rush's role in shaping Thomas Paine's writing of Common Sense, providing no information on the wide impact that pamphlet had. Unger does give Rush's thinking about the relationship of mind and body, which led to his being dubbed the "father of American psychiatry" by the American Psychiatric Association, more prominence than Fried does. Despite the book's flaws, it is a valuable introduction to a man justifiably characterized as "the founding father of an America that other founding fathers forgot an America of women, slaves, indentured workers, laborers, prisoners, the poor, the indigent sick and injured."
