Category: Digital Highlights

A 1923 physical education manual from Paraguay: Manual de educación física del niño y del adolescente : (Escuela francesa).

Apart from his pasting by William Cobbett, Rush is perhaps best known for his studies of the yellow fever epidemics that swept Philadelphia at the end of the eighteenth century.

We have many volumes of Rush’s medical writings available in our collection but I thought this one, written only a year after the major outbreak of 1793, merited a highlight.

New to us and the UKMHL: Thomas Couchman Barrett’s “receipt book.”

You may remember last week I wrote a brief post about my own efforts to track down materials in the MHL related to Benjamin Rush. I’ve spent a little time with the resources I found and, so far, William Cobbett’s 1801 The Rush-light is my favorite.

My professional training as a historian was in the field of modern Irish history (republican nationalism specifically) so every day I work with the MHL is an opportunity to learn more history of medicine.

Recently I’ve been reading Benjamin Park’s excellent first publication American Nationalisms which addresses the question of the lived — written, drawn, eaten, played — experience of nationalism among three particular communities in the early American republic: Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. With these as his areas of study, Park could hardly hope to avoid Benjamin Rush!

Knowing that Rush was an early American physician, noted for having an extended wrangle with William Cobbett, and with something of a reputation in later years for his ‘heroic’ style of medicine (which often involved copious bleedings), I thought we must have something on him in our collections.

Et voila: Benjamin Rush as viewed in the MHL.