Content area
Full Text
In 1765, prior to embarking on his formal study of medicine in Edinburgh, Benjamin Rush wrote to his friend Ebenezar Hazard, "I hope by hard study and longer attendance on the practice of physic to fit myself better to make a figure in Europe."1 Rush's ambition, marked by the concern that he "make a figure," is not surprising, since the young man was not yet 20 years old and at the outset of his professional career. As he prepared to leave for Edinburgh, Rush also requested that Benjamin Franklin send ahead letters on his behalf, in order that he might be well received upon arrival (Letters 1:27). Together the comments reveal that Rush was a planner, one who set out to accomplish his goals with a specific schema in mind. Rush repeated the concept in other letters, in commonplace books kept throughout his life, and in his posthumously published autobiography, underscoring his unceasing concern with his public figure. He implicitly suggested as much in his lectures and medical texts. His drive to achieve a prominent stature must have been apparent to many around him, for even the London publisher Edward Duly remarked upon it in 1771 when he wrote to Rush: "If your Health continues, and you possess the same vivacity which you had in England, I shall expect to hear in a short Time of your making a figure on the Western Continent, not only in the Medical World but in the republic of Letters" (qtd. in Butterfield, "American Interests," 302).
Rush's health and vivacity, indeed, enabled him to succeed at "mak[ing] a figure" in both the medical and literary worlds. Richard Shyrock proclaimed years ago that Rush was "the first medical man in the country to achieve a general literary reputation," Lyman Butterfield labeled a later period of Rush's life "Literary Fame and Domestic Tranquility," and several literary scholars have noted the impact of Rush's medical teachings upon American belles lettres of the early Republic and antebellum periods.2 Yet contributing to these successes were much more than Rush's health and vivacity. The realm of medicine and the "republic of Letters," worlds Duly distinguished simply with his rhetoric, were not so easily delineated in the day-to-day work of Rush.3 For him, as for others...