Dr. Benjamin Rush by Harlow Giles Unger

Author:Harlow Giles Unger [GILES UNGER, HARLOW]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2018-09-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

“You Cannot Die Now, Doctor!”

THE SELF-PROCLAIMED SUCCESS of Rush’s Thunderbolts in curing yellow fever drew crowds of patients to the doctor’s home day and night, slipping notes under his door when the doctor was asleep or away treating patients. “Please to come and see my daughter,” pleaded William Innes in one note. “Will the humane Dr. Rush condescend to step into the house of mourning?” asked another patient’s note. “Another of my family is ill.”1

Although several doctors remained skeptical, most—especially those in isolated rural areas—embraced Rush’s “discovery” and pleaded for his help as earnestly as patients, flooding his home with letters seeking directions on implementing his cure.

Scorning sleep, he rose before dawn each day, answering a few letters, then going downstairs to treat the ill who stood in long lines outside his door, many having arrived in the dead of night. His sister and five of his students lived in his house to help him cope. After treating some patients at home, he climbed into his two-wheeled chair and spurred his horse to a trot that took him to almost every street and alley in town. Although half the houses in the city were deserted, Rush seems to have treated the ill in every structure that still harbored the living. By nightfall, he had often seen as many as 150 patients, while his five apprentices treated twenty to thirty patients each in the Rush house. They, like Rush himself, were—for all they knew—risking their lives, as they treated each patient, but, infected by the Rush fervor to save the sick, they worked as tirelessly as their master. Blood flowed everywhere in and out of the Rush house, covering their clothes and his, as well as floors and walls, even oozing from the ground outside, where they bled patients when rooms in the house grew too crowded.

Rush and other physicians continued to believe yellow fever was contagious, and, as the epidemic grew worse, all but Rush, Physick, and two other doctors had either fled the city or died. Most of the city’s wealthy citizens—the only patients who could afford to pay their doctors—had also fled. By staying in town, Rush exposed himself not just to what he believed was a deadly contagious disease but to bankruptcy. Only Julia’s willingness to sell 227 acres she had inherited from her father, Richard Stockton, in Princeton, New Jersey, provided her with enough funds to feed herself and her children in their isolation at Morven.

“Sunday and Monday always seem as long as four days,” she complained to her husband, “because I do not get my daily letter, which is the only satisfaction I can now have in this state of exile and separation.”2

In Philadelphia, meanwhile, Rush was unable to meet the demand for his magical Thunderbolts, and he sent instructions on making them to apothecaries around town. He published printed instructions in the American Daily Advertiser for those able to obtain and mix the ingredients themselves. In doing so, he deprived himself of still more income making and selling Thunderbolts himself.

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