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.