Sarah E. Naramore responds to Chapter 2—America and the Transatlantic Enlightenment (1740-1800) in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History.
Science and Medicine Meets US Intellectual History
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen argues for the global dimensions of ideas as potent forces in the American War for Independence. “Looking at the American Revolution through the lens of intellectual history,” she writes, “helps draw out the importance of ideas for motivating colonists to take up arms and for giving them a vision of the new way of life for which they were fighting.”1 For her, “‘enlightened’ and ‘republican’ ideas were central to the drama” not only of the United States, but also in a broader Atlantic world.[1] For historians of the American Revolution and Early American Republic, such a statement rings true. Detangling American independence from the new world of ideas in which eighteenth-century people found themselves would be a futile endeavor. Individuals and communities in the former colonies shifted identities, lived through warfare, and tried to build a new nation while maintaining robust ties that stretched far beyond their own location on North America’s East Coast. One glimpses this especially when turning to the history of science and medicine during the era, and particularly to a figure such as Philadelphia physician, man of letters, and general busybody Benjamin Rush.
What Ratner-Rosenhagen calls “crossings,” the movements of ideas across national borders, were exactly how scientific and intellectual history of the late eighteenth century sat—or better said, moved.[2] This particular crossing, however, was unstable. A crossing implies a movement from one distinctive space to another. During the American Revolutionary Era, however, things were messier. Neither the United States nor the broader Atlantic World was clearly defined. To call these interactions crossings belies the complexity of a situation in which thirteen British colonies had, surprisingly, banded together to form an American nation called the United States. The transition was never a clean break.
What Ratner-Rosenhagen calls “crossings,” the movements of ideas across national borders, were exactly how scientific and intellectual history of the late eighteenth century sat—or better said, moved.
Moreover, it was not merely a semantic shift; it was also an embodied transformation, and people at the time knew it and felt it. For in the scientific theories of the day, a new identity and new government could alter both citizens’ bodies and the larger body politic. Crossings were not just simple, unidirectional affairs, frictionless flows of knowledge across well-established boundaries; they were also physical transformations at multiple levels of lived experience and conceptual understanding.
A Diagnosis
When we focus on the scientific side of Enlightenment discourse, we uncover new areas of intellectual history to explore within Ratner-Rosenhagen’s emphasis on the significance of ideas to the Revolution. It is no coincidence that many of the intellectual architects of American independence also indulged their scientific curiosity. From Franklin and Jefferson to the subject of my own research, Benjamin Rush, a rethinking of ideas about politics, education, culture, and other areas of life connected to inquiries into the natural world, medicine, and science. The social and the natural overlapped.
Throughout her chapter, Ratner-Rosenhagen provides a framework for how Enlightenment ideas, communicated across the Atlantic, shaped American intellectual history in the Age of Revolutions. Like any general overview, this “brief history” provides an opportunity to ask more questions. She compares American and European ideas over several decades, addresses the role of the Republic of Letters and moral philosophy, discusses the limitations of Enlightened ideas, and concludes with the political philosophy of revolution. She shows how, although Americans provided considerable information about new discoveries to European philosophers, they were far more than producers of raw material for, or passive consumers of, European ideas; Americans also encountered the “Enlightenment” as colonists, and then they lived it as revolutionaries.
North America was not merely a laboratory to test European ideas. As Ratner-Rosenhagen herself suggests, we might instead understand British-Americans and citizens of the United States as debating climate science, natural history, religion, and political economy in partnership with European colleagues. Americans brought their own cultural priorities and concerns to the discussion. In fact, it is not quite correct to argue, as Ratner-Rosenhagen does, that “British Americans contributed to Enlightenment thought not so much by inventing new ideas about human nature, the natural world, history, and government, but by testing and reformulating ideas that in eighteenth-century Europe could only be theorized.”[3] It is more accurate to assert her emphasis in the epilogue to The Ideas that Made America that a conversation took place across the ocean. Tracking the details and significance of this conversation is precisely how the history of science and medicine can speak fruitfully to intellectual histories of the era. When they do, ideas of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries appear not merely as one-way abstract disseminations—Old World theories tested in a New World laboratory—but rather as corporeal things. Conversations of the time were physical as well as intellectual.
Paying more attention to a figure such as Rush shows how histories of science and medicine can deepen the framework Ratner-Rosenhagen presents in her brief history of US intellectual history.
This is partly because when a revolution of ideas became a war for independence in the United States (and in later decades, similar yet distinct processes roiled France, Haiti, Mexico, Venezuela, and other nations in the “Age of Revolutions”), human bodies faced very physical consequences. During the Revolutionary era, not all Americans could participate directly in the political debates that formed the government. However, all people in the new United States were affected by the dramatic changes and the unstable world in which they lived. Benjamin Rush created a list of how the Revolution affected Americans, arguing that it “interested every inhabitant of the country of both sexes, and of every rank and age that was capable of reflection.” The war and independence forced novelty upon the mind; minds were forced to consider new ideas of duty, and that there was a “sudden dissolution of civil… and of ecclesiastical establishments” among other stressors. In short, the revolution fundamentally shook Americans to their bones. It changed them.[4]
Paying more attention to a figure such as Rush shows how histories of science and medicine can deepen the framework Ratner-Rosenhagen presents in her brief history of US intellectual history. Within the “transatlantic Enlightenment” of ideas was a surprising, important, and often underappreciated physicality of the Republic of Letters. So too, there was a growing interest in educational reform as Rush and others sought to square science and medicine with the new politics of the era. Finally, Rush helps us glimpse the relevance of science and medicine to the darker sides of the Enlightenment that Ratner-Rosenhagen herself notices. The positivistic pursuit of knowledge of the natural world and the human body not only brought forward positive changes, but it also had plenty of negative consequences too.
A Republic of Bodies as Well as Letters
In many ways, Benjamin Rush fits the bill perfectly for an American Enlightenment figure. Born in 1745 and dying in 1813, his life neatly fits within the timeline of the Revolutionary Era without moving too far into the nineteenth century. Rush was one of many engaged in the transatlantic conversations of revolution, Enlightenment, and scientific discovery. At the beginning of the Revolutionary Era, the young man entered this world with an excellent education and an itchy pen. By his mid-twenties, Rush was a prolific writer on a variety of subjects, from medicine to natural history to politics. Within two years of starting his medical practice, he had written on both the immorality of slavery and the chemical analysis of local mineral springs.[5]
Published in 1773, both documents spoke to the role of the physician in describing the physical, mental, and moral health of a society. Meanwhile, Rush maintained a robust correspondence with peers, students, and mentors on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. This included letters in French, a language that many of his Francophobic generation struggled with, and he could also read enough Latin, Spanish, German, and Italian to understand missives sent to him. Thousands of letters sent to Rush survive at the Library Company of Philadelphia from fellow physicians, family friends, and former students from nearly all of the American States and Territories that existed in his lifetime, as well as several European countries and their New World colonies. The Rush mailbox could be viewed as an important site of intellectual crossings.
Before continuing, however, it is worth discussing exactly who Benjamin Rush was. Rush was born in 1745 on a farm north of Philadelphia on the Delaware River. After the untimely death of his father, John Rush, in 1751, his mother, Susanna, moved the young family into the city where she supported herself and her children running a grocery. She also leveraged family and religious networks to invest in her sons’ educations. Both Benjamin and his younger brother Jacob excelled, proving to be good investments for the family in medicine and the law, respectively. After graduating from the College of New Jersey (Princeton University) and completing an initial medical apprenticeship in Philadelphia, Rush crossed the Atlantic seeking a medical degree from the famed University of Edinburgh in 1767.
Like hundreds of other young men during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Rush became a physical link in a chain connecting American and Scottish ideas and medical practices. Scottish medical ethics and emphasis on the social responsibility of physicians certainly influenced some American students.[6] Using Rush as a focal point, we can see how the American Enlightenment engaged with the development of science and medicine in North America alongside political ideas of republicanism and independence. The Republic of Letters relied upon direct expectances and the relationships forged by travel as well as epistolary exchanges.[7]
Due in part to the widely accepted eighteenth-century idea that bodies, minds, and spaces were connected, the very act of revolution can be interpreted as having physical consequences. Rush opens up a way of looking at embodied Enlightenment in which new ideas reshaped bodies because bodies, and the letters that traveled among them, shaped the ideas. The embodied and the epistolary worked in tandem, both for those privileged enough to see themselves as leaders and for those who were swept up in the currents of history.
In his autobiography, written as an older man for the benefit of his grown children, Rush discussed the philosophical and political awakening of his Edinburgh days. Like many who made transatlantic crossings, Rush found more in his travels than he initially sought. Looking back, he viewed himself as removed from politics before travel to Scotland, where he encountered new ideas from students and faculty from across the British Empire, some of whom questioned the correctness of monarchy. As a result, the young medical student “now suspected error in everything I had been taught or believed, and as far as I was able began to try the foundations of my opinions upon many other subjects.”[8] His statement reminds us that, as much as we might like to see the revolutionary era as a foundational one, the people who lived it viewed their world as chaotic and experimental. There was no singular shared commitment or view of the future. This impression was so strong that Rush often used the term revolution to describe the changes occurring in medicine, natural history, and chemistry at the same time. The speed of change and sense of newness are something that is hard to nail down, but essential to the attitude of the era.[9]
In addition to formal study, the young Rush also attended salons and clubs in Scotland and continued the practice on additional trips to London and Paris after completing his degree and before returning to Pennsylvania in 1769. The importance of physical movement and the sociability of intellectual life cannot be overlooked. In a letter to John Morgan (Philadelphia physician, Edinburgh alumnus, and near-peer mentor), Rush reported that he was making important connections in London. The young doctor attended clinical lectures at Middlesex Hospital and managed to obtain an introduction to Sir John Pringle.[10] Pringle was a leading medical figure of the era and published an influential book on diseases in the military following his experience in the 1740s in the War of Austrian Succession and Jacobite Rising. In 1772, Pringle was elected president of the prestigious Royal Society. While in London, Rush attended Pringle’s Wednesday evening “medical society” at the older man’s home.10 Such semi-formal gatherings served to spread ideas and lead to collaborations outside of publications. Decades later, Rush published an “American Edition” of Pringle’s work, updated and adding suggestions specifically suited to the climate and experiences of North American practitioners. Across time and space, Pringle’s interest in a young American proved influential.
Nor were Rush’s connections purely medical. Just before leaving the British capital, he received a letter from historian Catherine Macaulay in which she lamented the loss of his conversation from the “Senate” or her “republic” and promised to send packages to him in Philadelphia.[11] He also maintained a connection with French physician Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, often discussing their mutual friend Benjamin Franklin.[12] As noted above, upon his return to Pennsylvania, the young physician set to work making a name and career for himself. Indicative of things to come, his earliest publications include both the scientific (an analysis of the medicinal properties of local mineral springs) and the political (a treatise opposing the institution of slavery).
Like others of his generation discussed by Ratner-Rosenhagen, Rush had a wide variety of academic interests. He formed relationships with American intellectuals and strengthened ties with colonial peers. Information and materials like books and pamphlets readily circulated in the post of the “Republic of Letters” in the years leading up to the American Revolution. He also maintained relationships with British mentors. These ties not only survived but also thrived in post-independence America. Rush’s former professor and leading medical theorist, William Cullen (University of Edinburgh), praised the expansion of the American medical profession following the revolution while simultaneously noting his pleasure with the return of American students to Scotland after the war. He considered the return of students and letters from America as a sign of continued friendship between the nations.[13]
In this, Rush was not an anomaly. In her study of the history of climate science during the era, historian Anya Zilberstein recounts a similar sentiment in the correspondence between Benjamin Waterhouse, Professor of Medicine at Harvard, and Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, beginning in 1778.[14] However, Rush’s international reach extended further than just former professors and Enlightenment A-listers. In 1784, a doctor named Thomas Dancer referred patients to Rush from Jamaica in 1799, Rush sent books to Joseph Adams in Maderia, and in 1809 he received books and articles from John Burns in Glasgow. He also maintained a decades-long connection with booksellers and publishers Charles and Edward Dilly in London.[15]
Trans-Appalachian as Well as Transatlantic
As the eighteenth century inched toward the nineteenth, Rush’s networks expanded west as well as east, across the continent as well as across the ocean. They became Trans-Appalachian as well as Transatlantic. In fraught ways, American Enlightenment occurred in the same spaces and was carried out by the same people who created American Empire. Ratner-Rosenhangen does not investigate the West at this point in her study, but Rush’s lived experience indicates that the importance of American imperial expansion picked up from where the British had left off. The United States of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was in the unusual position of being simultaneously a post-colonial state and an expansionist empire. Crucially, knowledge of the West expressed in scientific language, as recent studies of American science suggest, served an important role for the young republic, especially in border regions.[16] While Rush remained in the center at Philadelphia, his network of friends and students penetrated far into the periphery. In a 1799 letter to Rush informing him of his election as an honorary member to the Lexington, Kentucky Society of the Promotion of Medical and Philosophical Knowledge, Samuel Brown called the city the “frontier of the Republic of Letters.” Brown certainly acted out the part of philosophical correspondent. In other missives, the Kentuckian shared information on botany, shipped “yellow root” to Rush, and recommended students to study in Philadelphia.[17]
Meanwhile, Rush’s multilingual abilities continued to be important when the Louisiana territory became part of the United States. French letters from the frontier commercial town of St. Louis reached Rush’s doorstep soon after the region’s acquisition by Thomas Jefferson. James St. Vrains and Louis Labeaumield, both in 1807, wrote to Philadelphia en français for medical advice. The flow of formal and informal news about the West persisted into the nineteenth century as discussed by Conevery Bolton Valenčius in her work of land, western migration, and health among the next generation of Americans.[18]
From Trained Eyes to Republican Machines
With respect to a new generation of Americans, Ratner-Rosenhagen introduces the concept of the trained eye at the heart of a new Enlightenment discourse. Seeing, she convincingly argues, was central to the rise of Enlightenment reason. This took on all the more urgency in the United States, where failing to train the eyes of the next generation might mean the end of the fragile republic itself. Without a solid educational foundation, American citizens would be ill-prepared to govern themselves. Rush went so far as to call for the creation of “republican machines,” children so perfectly educated in rational republican thought that they could not help but preserve and perfect the Revolution.
Empire and enlightenment were…linked in education by the material, embodied means of the very implements used scientifically in the classroom.
Much of this development of reason included pedagogies of the eye and the hands. Touchable tools of science, such as the globe and surveying equipment, became part of that process. In letters with his own son’s teacher, Rush and his correspondent debated the correct mode of education. The two men shared enthusiasm for the introduction of globes, at the school as well as training with surveying equipment for the boys. Both sets of instruments trained sight: the first in abstraction and the second by imposing order upon the directly observed world, yet they were also machines that at once embodied and represented a growing sense of global interconnectedness.[19] Empire and enlightenment were thus linked in education by the material, embodied means of the very implements used scientifically in the classroom.
In the 1780s and 1790s, Rush spilled much ink on the subject of education. In his 1806 second edition compilation of Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical the first six out of the total twenty-six essays focused on education in the new republic. Many others relate to subjects of morality and what we might call early political science. Taken together, they indicate Rush’s interest in the improvement of American society along both moral and Enlightened terms. The optic, as Ratner-Rosenhagen describes it, fits into this larger emphasis on humans wielding science to become generative conveyers of democratic ideals: republican machines in embodied action.
For Benjamin Rush, education was an essential component to the success of the nation. He wrote:
The business of education has acquired a new complexion by the independence of our country. The form of government we have assumed, has created a new class of duties to every American. It becomes us, therefore, to examine our former habits upon this subject, and in laying the foundations for nurseries of wise and good men, to adapt our modes of teaching to the peculiar form of our government.[20]
In the remainder of the essay, Rush lays out his arguments not only for reformed education but also for uniform education throughout the country to “render the mass of the people more homogeneous, and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government.”[21] In this respect, Rush connected institution building and the success of the republic with a physician and philosopher’s understanding of the human senses (something Ratner-Rosenhagen connected to Scottish Common Sense Philosophy) and early childhood development (something particular to Rush). The right instruction could literally shape malleable children into natural citizens. Nature and nurture for Rush were not separate categories, they acted in tension, each molding the other in bodies, governments, and landscapes.
Benjamin Rush, Notes on Education, The Library Company of Philadelphia, Rush MSS Vol. 313 (Yi2 7400.F.34), 1791. Source: Archive.org.
Training the eye also played an essential role in medical education and the advancement of the sciences in general. Medical school was, and remains, an educational process with one foot in theory and the other in practical experience. Lectures were only one part of becoming a good doctor. Students also spent time on hospital rounds, worked shifts at the dispensary (a kind of outpatient free clinic), and, as apprentices to someone like Rush, they carried out routine house calls and mixed drugs. All of this required a practiced eye and experienced hands. Between 1789 and 1813, Rush taught the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Philadelphia’s medical school. According to his own records from this time, over 3,000 students attended his lectures from this era, and a few dozen also lived in the Rush household. Those students fanned out across the country, taking their training with them into new locations and establishing new nodes in a Republic of Letters in constant flux.
God in All Things
It is also in Rush’s text on education that we see something else Ratner-Rosenhagen emphasizes: the American commitment to religion. In his personal life, Rush was a religious man and saw the hand of God in the natural world and in his work as a physician. Faith even featured in his self-described turn to medicine over religion. After graduating from the College of New Jersey, the young Rush planned to study law. A meeting with his former teacher, Samuel Finley, changed his mind. The minister and educator apparently argued that “the practice of the bar was full of temptations and advised me by no means to think of it, but to study physic…On what slight circumstances do our destines in life seem to depend! all my friends objected to my choice.”[22]
Objections or not, Rush went into medicine, yet he also maintained a keen interest in public life, broad education, and the virtues of Protestant Christianity. Together, he embodied what Ratner-Rosenhagen sees as one of the defining elements of American Enlightenment: to form proper republican virtue, Rush believed that religion needed to have a role in schools, not to promote any specific denomination, but for a general cultivation of virtue. Of course, this generalization of American Enlightenment and religion obscures a considerable amount of debate, uncertainty, and differing views, but it is there very strongly in Rush’s life and thinking.
We can clearly pin him as a Protestant Christian. His mother raised him in a Presbyterian Church that had been influenced by the mid-eighteenth-century Great Awakening and chose his schools and early mentors accordingly. At other points in time, he attended his wife’s Episcopal Church, supported the new African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), and dabbled in communities and ideas that would eventually form the Unitarian Universalist Church. On occasion, Rush would take advantage of Philadelphia’s dense urban configuration and attend multiple denominations’ services on a single Sunday.[23]
This kind of commitment to religion was not universal or even normal, but Rush firmly tied his Christianity to political life. According to him, “a Christian cannot fail of being a republican…for every precept of the Gospel inculcates those degrees of humility, self-denial, and brotherly kindness, which are directly opposed to the pride of monarchy.”[24] If anything, in his personal views, Rush went farther than his contemporaries to endorse Christianity and view the popularity of Deism warily. Upon the death of Thomas Paine, Rush noted his disapproval of Age of Reason in his commonplace book, stating that it “probably perverted more person from the Christian faith than any book that ever was written for the same purpose.”[25] Rush was open to the more radical explorations of the Enlightenment era, but only so far.
His falling out with Paine is all the more curious due to their shared interests. The two men started out with common goals, and Rush even took credit for suggesting that Paine call his pro-independence pamphlet Common Sense.[26] Over time, however, the two diverged on religious grounds. Whereas Rush saw God in all things, from physiology to government structure, Paine saw a world shaped primarily by human eyes, hands, and reason. But for Rush, it was only Biblical virtue that would allow the United States to thrive despite the diversity and geographic size of the country. The connection between virtue, cultivated minds, and healthy bodies also led Rush to become an unwitting architect of what later historians have termed Republican Motherhood, with its breakthroughs yet also its containments for women’s rights in the Enlightenment era.
Paine, on the other hand, moved towards a more secular Enlightenment. In the opening of Age of Reason, the text Rush found so dangerous, Paine confirmed a belief in a higher power but rejected all specific theologies as “human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit.”[27] His move away from Protestantism makes him, in some sense, more modern than Rush. It created an intellectual framework for later nineteenth century figures to define themselves while walking the line between religion and total freethinking, whereas Rush looks, in historical hindsight, much more a man of the late-eighteenth-century moment.[28] Either way, at the turn of the nineteenth century, Republican machines needed a manual, and would fall short if reduced just to a wandering eye.
We Behold Our Ladies
Religion was not the only controversial issue Rush addressed in his work on education. He also specifically addressed the question of schools for girls in a speech given at the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia in 1787. Here, perhaps, Rush was ahead of his time. Women and girls, after all, constitute one of the “blind spots” of the Enlightenment for Ratner-Rosenhagen. For all the Transatlantic revolutionary interest in expansions of republicanism and even democracy, equality between the sexes was nowhere in sight.
At least it was not within the optic eye of rational Enlightenment, but it may have been (with qualifications) for Rush. That he specifically addressed education for girls likely stemmed from a few sources. Intellectually, he may have been following Locke’s idea of marriage as a compact between husband and wife.[29] That companionship model of marriage undergirds much of Revolutionary American thought about the role of women in the republic as addressed by scholars such as Mary Beth Norton, Karen Wulf, and Linda K. Kerber.[30] Even the casual student of American Revolutionary history knows about the frank and surprisingly equal marriage of John and Abigail Adams. Their friends, Benjamin and Julia Stockton Rush, also appear to have lived out something like this version of a marriage of respected companions with shared intellectual interests. They also shared a rather passionate marriage if Julia’s thirteen pregnancies and Benjamin’s lecture hall comments about the connection between health and conjugal happiness are taken into account.
By the time Rush gave his address to the Academy in 1787, he and Julia were parents to four living children (two died in infancy) in eleven years of marriage, including then eight-year-old Emily and three-year-old Mary. Five years later, the Rush children would be joined by a third sister, Julia, named after their well-educated mother. Although it is unclear if Julia Stockton Rush attended school, she was the eldest child of poet Annis Boudinot Stockton, one of a handful of American women published in the eighteenth century. She also grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, a stone’s throw from the University at which her father Richard was an important alumnus. Julia read widely with her husband, was musically proficient, and impressed everyone from writer Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson to Latin American Revolutionary Francisco de Merinda. Here again, in the zone of married life, direct interactions were very much a part of the Republic of Letters. Rush and Julia not only lived together, but they seem to have taught together as well.
With respect to girls education in a republic, Rush argued that several aspects of American life needed to be taken into consideration: the young age at which women married (Julia Rush, for example, had been just shy of seventeen on her wedding day), the need for women to assist in all parts of a family’s business, the role of mothers in the early education of their children, the need for moral education in a republic, and the lack of well-trained servants compared to England. As a result of the conditions found in the newly formed United States, he claimed that American girls needed to be well-versed in many topics:
An acquaintance with geography and some instruction in chronology will enable a young lady to read history, biography, and travels, with advantage; and thereby qualify her not only for a general intercourse with the world, but to be an agreeable companion for a sensible man. To these branches of knowledge may be added, in some instances, a general acquaintance with the first principles of astronomy natural philosophy and chemistry, particularly, with such parts of them as are calculated to prevent superstition, by explaining the causes, or obviating the effects of natural evil, and such, as are capable of being ap|plied to domestic, and culinary purposes.[31]
As was characteristic of Rush, but less so for his non-medical contemporaries, many of his recommendations were accompanied by a biological justification. In the cases of singing lessons, for example, Rush argued that it was not only beneficial for the mind, caring for children, or participating in church services, but also that “the exercise of the organs of the breast…contributes very much to defend them from those diseases to which our climate; and other causes, have of late exposed them.” Essentially, if you want to avoid a dangerous influenza, make sure you sing as you exercise.[32] It was good for both the physical body and the larger polity. Once again, Rush’s transatlantic Enlightenment was not only about the eye, but rather a broader linkage between scientific and medical knowledge, on the one hand, and a republican politics, on the other.
Interestingly, it is also in Rush’s discussion of education for girls that he makes a strong argument for the importance of American independence of thought beyond education. It is worth taking a look at the whole paragraph:
It should not surprise us that British customs, with respect to female education, have been transplanted into our American schools and families. We see marks of the same incongruity, of time and place, in many other things. We behold our houses accommodated to the climate of Great Britain, by eastern and western direction. We behold our ladies panting in a heat of ninety degrees, under a hat and cushion, which were calculated from the temperature of a British summer. We behold our citizens condemned and punished by a criminal law, which was copied from a country, where maturity in corruption renders public executions a part of the amusements of the nation. It is high time to awake from this servility—to study our own character—to examine the age of our country—and to adopt manners in every thing, that shall be accommodated to our state of society, and to the form of our government. In particular it is incumbent upon us to make ornamental accomplishments yield to principles and knowledge, in the education of our women.[33]
In his statements, Rush finds a sort of balance between universal ideas of Enlightenment, such as use of reason and science to make decisions, as well as assumptions about shared faculties among humans, while, at the same time, making the argument for a particular national character. He saw Americans, shaped by revolution and self-government, as a unique and new people, both physically and intellectually. While Ratner-Rosenhagen cautions us against discounting the importance of ideas when looking at American history of this period, Rush also asks us not to forget the physical world. Revolution was embodied.
In the eighteenth century, physicians and lay people alike assumed that there were very real connections between the world of the mind and the world of the body. Impressions and strong emotions on the brain could alter blood flow, irritate the nerves, or even shape a fetus in the womb. A new government, a war, and a new world of reason shaped the whole country’s impressions. Revolution, for someone such as Rush, represented physical as well as political and intellectual change. Children, both boys and girls, of the new republic needed to be educated as republicans to fit their environment in the same way that Americans needed to reconsider their home-building and fashion choices to fit the weather. Republican ideas of the Enlightenment needed bodies to enact them, and affected bodies when put into action.
Racial Bodies
Before concluding, I want to address the other great “blind spot” in the Enlightenment, as addressed by Ratner-Rosenhagen: the issue of race. In the chapter, she defines two “paths” that enlightened thinkers might take with respect to race. The first led to the first generation of white anti-slavery advocates. They brought additional intellectual weight to the moral and religious arguments of Quakers and other radical protestants. The second, however, “sent them back to familiar ways of viewing social worlds and providing new justifications for them.” Ratner-Rosenhagen argues that, “for thinkers along that second path, the latest Enlightenment science proved that the differences between the races are as clear as black and white.”[34]
The development of ideas of race, of course, has a long intellectual history of its own. To have a sense of clear racial difference between “black” and “white,” one first must give those terms meaning in reference to human beings. As Sharon Block demonstrates in her work with eighteenth-century runaway advertisements for enslaved people and indentured servants, racial terminology changed significantly during the era of the American Enlightenment. [35] Within medical and scientific circles, both pro- and anti-slavery individuals discussed and debated how racial difference formed, how “fixed” race really was, and to what extent racialized characteristics were the result of nature versus the conditions of slavery.[36] In this manner, individuals might find themselves on both of the “paths” Ratner-Rosenhagen sketches out. They were less of a clear binary than she suggests. Not all who opposed slavery rejected racial stereotyping. Moreover, no one was fully in control of how their ideas might be used by others.
Rush is an especially useful example in seeing how tangled these paths really were. On the one hand, Rush’s opposition to slavery is relatively straightforward and easy to demonstrate. He found the practice morally repugnant and made his stance known early in his career. In terms of the intellectual capacity of people of African descent, Rush would have been among the voices condemning Jefferson’s racist dismissal of Black intelligence in Notes on the State of Virginia, which Ratner-Rosenhagen discusses.[37] He also actively cultivated friendships with leading African Americans and wanted to see himself as an ally in ending slavery. His correspondence with men such as Black physician James Durham, ministers Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, and mathematician Benjamin Banneker (who famously and directly critiqued Jefferson), are genuinely kind.[38] They are relationships between colleagues and equals.
Rush has also, quite justifiably, been criticized by historians for his statements and beliefs regarding racial difference and health. In the context of the 1793 yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia, Rush initially supported the arguments made by Caribbean physicians that Black people were immune to the disease. Although he eventually moderated that view, Rush maintained that black bodies were not only different from white bodies, but also, by definition, they were ill. Here, he moved troublingly closer to Jefferson’s hypocrisies and contradictions. When he considered the achievements of Black colleagues, he saw them as rising above their biological limitations rather than viewing their racial background as incidental. Enlightenment science, in this sense, was no simplistic force of reason. It could lead to deeply wrong, illiberal, undemocratic, and unrepublican ideas, too, even for someone who maintained meaningful relationships across fast-solidifying boundaries of racial identity and who opposed racialized slavery.
Infamously, Rush claimed that Sub-Saharan Africans suffered from a disease similar to leprosy (Hansen’s Disease). In doing so, he relied upon stereotypes of black bodies that calcified in the American medical profession during the late eighteenth century, including the dangerous idea that Black people do not feel pain as strongly as white people or indigenous North Americans. This argument was not a one-off for Rush, and the general theory appears in several student notebooks from the University of Pennsylvania. One such notebook lays out Rush’s views in the context of human history as well as supposed common-sense observations. During the winter of 1797-98 Elijah Griffiths recorded Rush claiming of Sub-Saharan Africans that “I imagine that their color arose in the first place from the leprosy; & that they exhibit all or most of the signs of that disease, a big lip, flat nose & the offensive smell they emit from their bodies, indicate presence of leprosy, together with nervous insensibility.”[39] Reaching for scientific explanations, Rush reproduced the growing racism of his time.
Benjamin Rush, A Memorial Containing Travels Through Life or Sundry Incidents in the Life of Dr. Benjamin Rush, ed. Louis Alexander Biddle (Philadelphia: Lanorae, 1905). Source: Archive.org.
The disease argument Rush proposed stemmed from “Enlightened” stadial theory alongside the assumption that racial differences came from environmental differences. He hypothesized that the “savage” state of society in Africa, alongside the hot, humid, and sickly environment, produced blackness as a congenital disease. Meanwhile, the degraded state of slavery perpetuated that disease even in a healthy and temperate environment. His solution was simple: abolition and assimilation of those of African descent to European-American cultural norms. This line of reasoning, unique to Rush for the most part, demonstrates the way that Enlightened ideas could lead to a dizzying mix of racist and antiracist ends. While reproducing racial difference and hierarchy in his scientific theories, Rush also sought universal explanations and his own ideas of social and biological improvement.
Moreover, in Rush’s race theory, we can see so many impulses of Enlightenment era medicine in the United States. The desire to find universal similarity while explaining difference, justification for the superiority of Enlightened societies, and some connection to a moral imperative. Rush seemed to need a physical explanation for human difference, but also strived for one that could be overcome with the right application of knowledge and medical intervention. Of course, the whole idea that the solution to discrimination as the elimination of difference is disturbing to our modern sensibilities, and maybe even to some of Rush’s peers, but it fits neatly with the desire for a uniform republic Rush expressed in his writing on education. Enlightenment universality had within it both the culture of domination and emancipation. In some sense, these competing outgrowths of the late-eighteenth century are still playing out in our own times.
Rushing Toward the Future
What does this short jaunt through the world of Benjamin Rush bring to our understanding of American Enlightenment? Figures such as Rush add texture to Ratner-Rosenhagen’s necessarily quick survey. His views on education, gender, and race remind us that the connections between science and medicine, on the one hand, and politics, on the other, suggest a world in which Enlightenment reason could push toward our modern sensibilities at times, but also could become quite unreasonable. They arose not only through the intellectual world of letters and writing, but also through social and physical experiences.
They also encompassed many topics in an attempt to relate them all to each other. In the span of a few pages, for instance, note that we have jumped from education to physiology to politics. The seamless range of Rush is, to some degree, characteristic of his era, before our sharp disciplinary divisions. What modern minds categorize as vastly different areas of knowledge intersected and overlapped.
In its emphasis on some of these complexities, the version presented by Ratner-Rosenhagen provides an admirable introduction to this world. If we recognize her framework of “crossings” as messy and multidirectional during the Enlightenment era, we can take seriously how the “ideas that made America” were always in motion, always moving across space, bodies, and subjects. It was an era of exciting, revolutionary uncertainty in which figures such as Rush tried to make sense of science, medicine, religion, politics, and society through their senses as well as their theories. They imagined themselves standing on the shoulders of giants from Locke to William Cullen to David Hume, trying to glimpse the future and create a new epoch.
About the Author
Sarah E. Naramore is an assistant professor of history at Northwest Missouri State University and author of the recent book, Benjamin Rush, Civic Health, and Human Illness in the Early American Republic (University of Rochester Press, 2023). Her research focuses on the intersection between history of medicine and histories of identity and nation-building in the early United States.
Notes
[1] Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, Ideas that Made America, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press (2019)48.
[2] Ratner-Rosenhagen,4.
[3] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 31.
[4] Benjamin Rush, “An Account of the Influence of the Military and Political Events of the American Revolution upon the Human Body,” in Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. I, 2nd Edition (Philadelphia: J. Conrad & Co, 1805) 279-281.
[5] Benjamin Rush, An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements, on the Slavery of the Negroes in America, the Second Edition (Philadelphia: Printed and Sold by John Dunlap, 1773); Benjamin Rush, Experiments and Observations on the Mineral Waters of Philadelphia, Abington, and Bristol, in the Province of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: James Humphreys Jr., 1773).
[6] For more, see Lisbeth Haakonssen, Medicine and Morals in the Enlightenment: John Gregory, Thomas Percival, and Benjamin Rush (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997).
[7] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 32-33.
[8] Benjamin Rush, A Memorial Containing Travels Through Life or Sundry Incidents in the Life of Dr. Benjamin Rush, ed. Louis Alexander Biddle (Philadelphia: Lanorae, 1905), 26.
[9] Benjamin Rush to Jonathan Baynard Smith (Edinburgh, April 30, 1767) Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. L.H. Butterfield (Princeton, NJ: Published for the American Philosophical Society by Princeton University Press, 1951), 41.
[10] Benjamin Rush to John Morgan (London, October 21, 1769), Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. L.H. Butterfield (Princeton, NJ: Published for the American Philosophical Society by Princeton University Press, 1951), 66.
[11] Catherine Macaulay to Benjamin Rush (1769) Library Company of Philadelphia, Rush Family Papers, Benjamin Rush Correspondence, Vol. XXIII, hereafter all correspondence is from this collection unless otherwise noted.
[12] Letters from 1769 to 1777 in Vol. XLIII.
[13] Letters from William Cullen to Benjamin Rush (1783-85) Vol XXIV.
[14] Anya Zilberstein, A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press (2016) 55.
[15] All letters referenced are at the Library Company of Philadelphia, Rush Family Papers Collection, Benjamin Rush Correspondence. The collection may also be accessed at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
[16] For examples, see Cameron B. Strang, Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Conevery Bolton Valenčius, et al., “Science in Early America: Print Culture and the Sciences of Territoriality,” Journal of the Early Republic 36, no. 1 (2016): 73–123.
[17] Samuel Brown to Benjamin Rush (Letters from 1799 to 1802), Library Company of Philadelphia, Rush Family Papers, Benjamin Rush Correspondence, Vol. XXI.
[18] Convery Bolton Valenčius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land, New York: Basic Books (2002) 7-8.
[19] J. Hall (1798), Library Company of Philadelphia, Rush Family Papers, Benjamin Rush Correspondence, Vol. XXII.
[20] Benjamin Rush “Of the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic,” in Essays Literary, Moral, and Philosophical, 2nd Edition, Philadelphia: Thomas and William Bradford (1806) 6-7.
[21] Rush “Of the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic.” 8.
[22] Rush, Travels Through Life, 18-19.
[23] Rush, Travels Through Life, 126.
[24] Rush “Of the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic,” 8-9.
[25] Rush, Travels Through Life, 196.
[26] Rush, Travels Through Life, 84.
[27] Thomas Paine, “The Age of Reason, Part I (1794),”in Paine Political Writings, ed. Bruce Kuklick, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 2000) 266.
[28] Leigh Eric Schmidt, The Church of Saint Thomas Paine: A Religious History of American Secularism, (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021) xii-xiii.
[29] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 38.
[30] See Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980); Mary Beth Norton, Separated by Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Karin A. Wulf, Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Linda K. Kerber, “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment – An American Perspective,” in Toward and Intellectual History of Women: Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 41–62.
[31] Benjamin Rush, “Thoughts upon female education, accommodated to the present state of society, manners, and government, in the United States of America,” in Essays, Literary, Moral, and Philosophical, 2nd Edition (Philadelphia: Thomas and William Bradford, 1806) 76-82.
[32] Benjamin Rush, “Thoughts upon female education,” 80.
[33] Benjamin Rush, “Thoughts upon female education,” 87.
[34] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 39.
[35] See Sharon Block, Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
[36] See Suman Seth, Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018) for further reading.
[37] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 41.
[38] “To Thomas Jefferson from Benjamin Banneker, 19 August 1791,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-22-02-0049. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 22, 6 August 1791 – 31 December 1791, ed. Charles T. Cullen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986, pp. 49–54.]
[39] Elijah Griffiths, “Notes from Dr. Rushes [sic] Lectures (1797-1798),” College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 10a 106, Vol. II.