RUSH

Rush -  Revolution, Madness & The Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father, by Stephen Fried, Crown 2018 

Adams, Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton - such are the names most of us recall as the biggies during the beginnings of our revolution, but Benjamin Rush?  A physician?  What was he doing there in the midst of all our civil discourse defining the principles we would fight for and grow?  What could Benjamin Rush have known about God-given vs. acquired or granted right and liberties?

Well, turns out, this brilliant and proactive citizen saw things the other guys somehow missed.  At age thirty, Rush was one of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, and one of the first Sons of Liberty in Philadelphia.  According to author Fried, his anonymous writings helped inspire the Boston Tea Party.

As a physician, Rush was extreme and pioneering.  He left his pregnant wife (and his congressional seat) to treat patients at six major Revolutionary War battles, often behind enemy lines, and was later named General Washington's surgeon general.  From his beginnings as the son of a Philadelphia blacksmith, Rush grew his reputation as a progressive reformer concerned with race and other liberation issues.  Even as he was credited with saving Philadelphia from a yellow fever epidemic, he found himself targeted by partisan media in a fight that ended in one of the nation's first libel trials!  Sound familiar?

Yet, the name Benjamin Rush remains relatively unknown and unstudied.  As a researcher, Stephen Fried uncovered facts about Rush's political activities and professional drive that parallel much of our current public concerns.  "It is amazingly resonant.  Some days, it feels almost too resonant, like we haven't made any progress at all... What is uncanny, though, is to see how many of the issues we grapple with today became immediately apparent to Rush, as he started thinking about what a country that had had a king and a state religion would have to confront once it had neither."