My remarks, you will please to observe, go only to the expediency, not to the merits of the proposition: what may be necessary and proper hereafter, I hold myself incompetent to decide; as I am but a private citizen. You may, however, rest satisfied, that your composition is calculated to give favourable impressions of the science, candour and ingenuity, with which you have handled the subject; and that, in all personal considerations, I remain with great esteem, Sir, your most obedient and most humble servant,
Go. Washington.
Wm. Barton, Esq.
Dr. Benjamin Rush.
The foregoing Memoirs were entirely completed and prepared for the press, before the decease of this Professor occurred; as is mentioned in the preface.
Benjamin Rush was born in the county of Philadelphia, on the twenty-fourth day of December, 1745, O.S. Having graduated in the Arts at Princeton College, in the autumn of the year 1760, and afterwards studied medicine under the direction of the late John Redman, M. D. of Philadelphia, he completed his medical education at the University of Edinburgh; where he received the degree of Doctor in Medicine, in the spring of 1768. Returning to Philadelphia in the summer of 1769, he was, on the 31st of July, in that year, appointed Professor of Chemistry, in the College of Philadelphia; that chair having been supplied for some time before, by the late John Morgan, M. D. F. R. S. &c. About twenty years after this appointment (viz. in 1789), he succeeded Dr. Morgan in the Professorship of the Theory and Practice of Physic, in the same College: and in the year 1791, on the union of that College with the University of Pennsylvania, he was chosen Professor of the Institutes and Practice of Physick, &c. in the conjoint institution.
At divers times, and on various occasions, his talents were employed in affairs of political concern. Besides having held, at different[different] periods, several other public stations, he was appointed a member of Congress for Pennsylvania, on the 20th of July, 1776: when he, together with some of his colleagues, appointed at the same time, subscribed the Declaration of American Independence; which great national act had received the sanction of congress, and been generally signed by the members, sixteen days before.
He died of a typhus fever, in Philadelphia, on the 19th day of April, 1813; being then advanced a few months beyond the sixty-seventh year of his age.
At the time of his decease, Dr. Rush was Professor of the Institutes of Medicine, of the Theory and Practice of Physic, and of Clinical Medicine, in the University of Pennsylvania: to which chair, vacated by his death, Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton, Professor of Materia Medica, Natural History and Botany, in the same institution, was elected in the month of July, 1813.