Benjamin Rush Quotes

It would seem from this fact, that man is naturally a wild animal, and that when taken from the woods, he is never happy in his natural state, 'till he returns to them again.

Patriotism is as much a virtue as justice, and is as necessary for the support of societies as natural affection is for the support of families.

Temperate, sincere, and intelligent inquiry and discussion are only to be dreaded by the advocates of error. The truth need not fear them

The American war is over, but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution.

The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty; and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments....We waste so much time and money in punishing crimes, and take so little pains to prevent them. We profess to be republicans, and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government, that is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity, by means of the Bible; for this divine book, above all others favors that equality among mankind, that respect for just laws.

[Philip's death was] beyond comparison the most afflicting of my life.... He was truly a fine youth. But why should I repine? It was the will of heaven and he is now out of the reach of the seductions and calamities of a world full of folly, full of vice, full of danger, of least value in proportion as it is best known. I firmly trust also that he has safely reached the haven of eternal repose and felicity. (Alexander Hamilton letter to Benjamin Rush about the death of his 19-year old son from mortal wounds inflicted from a duel.)

Sometimes...I lose myself in looking back upon the ocean which I have passed, and now and then find myself surprised by a tear in reflecting upon the friends I have lost, and the scenes of distress that I have witnessed, and which I was unable to relieve. —Dr. Benjamin Rush

I closed my eyes and let the water rush over me and I wondered what it would be like to be as soft as water, to make people clean, to quench people's thirst. That would be a beautiful thing, to be like water.

Some talked,some wrote, and some fought to promote and establish it, but you, Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson thought for us all

I do not mean to exclude books of history, poetry, or even fables from our schools. They may and should be read frequently by our young people, but if the Bible is made to give way to them altogether, I foresee that it will be read in a short time only in churches and in a few years will probably be found only in the offices of magistrates and in courts of justice. (1786)

I am pursuing Truth, and am indifferent whither I am led, if she is my only leader.

The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion. Without it there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object of all republican governments.

The United States was founded during the most secular era in American history, either before or since. In the late eighteenth century, church membership was low, and anticlerical feeling was high. It is no accident that the Constitution does not mention God. Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush wondered, politely, whether this error might be corrected, assuming it to have been an oversight. “Perhaps an acknowledgement might be made of his goodness or of his providence in the proposed amendments,” he urged.27 No correction was made.

I wish that the founders had had the foresight to hang on to and enshrine another one of Independence Hall’s chairs, the one that Benjamin Rush mentioned in a letter to John Adams about how Thomas Jefferson objected when his colleagues in the Continental Congress considered a fast day, which Jefferson pooh-poohed as too religious. Rush reminded Adams, ‘You rose and defended the motion, and in reply to Mr. Jefferson’s objections to Christianity you said you were sorry to hear such sentiments …. You suspected, you told me, that you had offended him, but that he soon convinced you to the contrary by crossing the room and taking a seat in the chair next to you.’ Who knows what happened to that particular chair. … But it might have been a more helpful, sobering symbolic object than that chair with the rising sun. Then perhaps citizens making pilgrimages to Independence Hall could file past the chair Jefferson walked across an aisle to sit in, and we could all ponder the amount of respect, affection, and wishy-washy give-and-take needed to keep a house divided in reasonable repair.

Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death . . . It would seem strange that ignominy should ever have been adopted as a milder punishment than death, did we not know that the human mind seldom arrives at truth up on any subject till it has first reached the extremity of error. —BENJAMIN RUSH, “AN ENQUIRY INTO THE EFFECTS OF PUBLIC PUNISHMENTS UPON CRIMINALS, AND UPON SOCIETY,” MARCH 9, 1787

Why did people think they could be alone? Everyone you loved or hated or touched or who made you tremble or bruised you—they were always there, ready to enter and take over the room. It didn’t matter at all if you opened the door or not. They came rushing in. They knew the way, knew how to make themselves at home.

Public shaming can also carry a painful stigma. “Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death,” wrote Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who also sought to put an end to public stocks and whipping posts.

I had, by then, done my share of reading on Philadelphia, so I knew that, in another time, when the Task was here in Philadelphia, the city had fallen victim to a fever. And among the men who combatted this fever was Benjamin Rush, a famous doctor, which is hard to countenance given the theory he put forth in defense of the city. Colored people were immune to the fever, he told Philadelphia, and more than immune, their very presence could alter the air itself, sucking up the scourge and holding it captive in our fetid black bodies. And so tasking men were brought in by the hundreds on the alleged black magic of our bodies. They all died. And when the city began to fill with their corpses, its masters searched for a space far from the whites who were felled by the disease. And they chose a patch of land where no one lived, and tossed us into pits. Years later, after the fever had been forgotten, after the war had birthed this new country, they built rows and rows of well-appointed houses right on top of those people, and and named a square for their liberating general. It struck me that even here, in the free North, the luxuries of this world were built right on top of us.

Beckley had an unslakable thirst for political intelligence. Benjamin Rush said of Beckley that “he possesses a fund of information about men and things and, what is more in favor of his principles, he possesses the confidence of our two illustrious patriots, Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison.” 32 Beckley was constantly trying to dig up derogatory information to satisfy the Republican fantasy that Hamilton and Washington headed a pro-British monarchical conspiracy. Jefferson never shed his intense admiration for Beckley. When elected president himself, he restored Beckley as clerk of the House of Representatives and, loading him down with still more honors, appointed him the first librarian of Congress.

IT WOULD BE USELESS FOR US TO DENOUNCE THE SERVITUDE TO WHICH THE PARLIAMENT OF GREAT BRITAIN WISHES TO REDUCE US, WHILE WE CONTINUE TO KEEP OUR FELLOW CREATURES IN SLAVERY JUST BECAUSE THEIR COLOR IS DIFFERENT FROM OURS. —SIGNER OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE DR. BENJAMIN RUSH, WHO PURCHASED WILLIAM GRUBBER IN 1776 AND DID NOT FREE HIM UNTIL 1794 O

Keep in mind that when we were founded by those Americans of the eighteenth century, none had had any prior experience in revolutions or nation making. They were, as we would say, winging it. They were idealistic and they were young. We see their faces in the old paintings done later in their lives or looking at us from the paper money in our wallets, and we see the awkward teeth and the powdered hair, and we think of them as elder statesmen. But George Washington, when he took command of the Continental Army at Cambridge in 1775, was forty-three, and he was the oldest of them. Jefferson was thirty-three when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. John Adams was forty. Benjamin Rush - one of the most interesting of them all - was thirty when he signed the Declaration. They were young people, feeling their way, improvising, trying to do what would work. They had no money, no navy, no real army. There wasn't a bank in the entire country. It was a country of just 2,500,000 people, 500,000 of whom were held in slavery. And think of this: Few nations in the world know when they were born. We know exactly when we began and why we began and who did it.

Thomas Paine had failed at everything he ever attempted in Britain: shopkeeping, teaching, tax collecting (twice), and marriage (also twice). For years he made whalebone corset stays in dreary provincial towns, then worked as an exciseman, chasing Dutch gin and tobacco smugglers along the English coast before being sacked for cause. Forced into bankruptcy—“Trade I do not understand,” he admitted—in desperation he sailed for Philadelphia and immediately found work editing the Pennsylvania Magazine, printing articles on Voltaire, beavers, suicide, and revolutionary politics. A gifted writer, infused with egalitarian and utopian ideals, he attacked slavery, dueling, animal cruelty, and the oppression of women. On January 10, 1776, a thousand copies of his new pamphlet on the American rebellion had been published anonymously under a simple title suggested by Dr. Benjamin Rush.

Christianity, then, was in one sense the stone these builders of the American nation rejected, except for Benjamin Rush and Charles Carroll. Yet the other Founding Fathers, even as modern men, still held fast to much that was good from the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Jefferson's enthusiasm for the defense of reason, natural law, and the principle of subsidiarity is worthy of the best Christian thinkers. And there could be no better advice (properly understood) for any age than Franklin's "imitation of Jesus and Socrates, " for man needs humbly to live both the life of the spirit and the intellect. But it was the most unlikely of all of them, the Caesarist Alexander Hamilton, who, laying down his life for an enemy, proved that the lives and thought of the Founding Fathers - even in the heady days of the American revolution - could be completely transformed. Obedient to Christ's command of absolute love, Hamilton died very much in the manner of those other and greater figures of destiny, those who build the futures of two worlds, the only true revolutionaries - the saints.

Keep in mind that when we were founded by those Americans of the eighteenth century, non had had any prior experience in revolutions or nation making. They were, as we would say, winging it. They were idealistic and they were young. We see their faces in the old paintings done later in their lives or looking at us from the paper money in our wallets, and we see the awkward teeth and the powdered hair, and we think of them as elder statesmen. But George Washington, when he took command of the Continental Army at Cambridge in 1775, was forty-three, and he was the oldest of them. Jefferson was thirty-three when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. John Adams was forty. Benjamin Rush - one of the most interesting of them all - was thirty when he signed the Declaration. They were young people, feeling their way, improvising, trying to do what would work. They had no money, no navy, no real army. There wasn't a bank in the entire country. It was a country of just 2,500,000 people, 500,000 of whom were held in slavery. And think of this: Few nations in the world know when they were born. We know exactly when we began and why we began and who did it.

The blizzard, created when an enormous trough of cold air rushing in from the Arctic had met up with an equally enormous influx of warm, wet air from the gulf, gobbled up everything in its path. The collision generated a force of energy no one could remember seeing in their lifetimes, but that all would talk about with wonder until the day they died.

Invoking the story of David, Davies implored his students to “imbibe and cherish a public spirit. Serve your generation. Live not for your selves, but the public. Be the servants of the Church; the servants of your Country; the servants of all.” He exhorted them to “esteem yourselves” not by how much “more happy, honourable and important” you can become but by how much “more useful you are!

Jefferson then distilled and enunciated these “essentials” in several personal works he shared with friends, his “Syllabus,” and two extracts from the Bible: “The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth,” and “The Life and Morals of Jesus,” sometimes called the “Jefferson Bible.” In these works Jefferson disputed core Christian doctrines while he omitted references to miracles and Jesus’ resurrection. Although his own spirituality apparently grew later in life, he remained a religious skeptic and on the fringes of unitarianism in his beliefs. Throughout his life he opposed religious orthodoxy and intolerance, and the government’s subversion of religion for political gain. “To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed,” Jefferson wrote Benjamin Rush, “but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself.”90

The disappearance of public executions marks therefore the decline of the spectacle; but it also marks a slackening of the hold on the body. In 1787, in an address to the Society for Promoting Political Enquiries, Benjamin Rush remarked: ‘I can only hope that the time is not far away when gallows, pillory, scaffold, flogging and wheel will, in the history of punishment, be regarded as the marks of the barbarity of centuries and of countries and as proofs of the feeble influence of reason and religion over the human mind’ (Teeters, 1935, 30). Indeed, sixty years later, Van Meenen, opening the second penitentiary congress, in Brussels, recalled the time of his childhood as of a past age: ‘I have seen the ground strewn with wheels, gibbets, gallows, pillories; I have seen hideously stretched skeletons on wheels’ (Annales de la Charité, 529–30).

home of Elon Simpson. We were right off of Washington Square, a part of the city marked by well-appointed brownstones with shuttered windows and a park hailing back to this country’s birth. Here was the seat of this city’s Quality—and the seat of our dead. I had, by then, done my share of reading on Philadelphia, so I knew that, in another time, when the Task was here in Pennsylvania, the city had fallen victim to a wave of fever. And among the men who combatted this fever was Benjamin Rush, a famous doctor, which is hard to countenance given the theory he put forth in defense of the city. Colored people were immune to the fever, he told Philadelphia, and more than immune, their very presence could alter the air itself, sucking up the scourge and holding it captive in our fetid black bodies. And so tasking men were brought in by the hundreds on the alleged black magic of our bodies. They all died. And when the city began to fill with their corpses, its masters searched for a space far from the whites who were felled by the disease. And they chose a patch of land where no one lived, and tossed us into pits. Years later, after the fever had been forgotten, after the war had birthed this new country, they built rows and rows of well-appointed houses right on top of those people, and named a square for their liberating general. It struck me that even here, in the free North, the luxuries of this world were built right on top of us.

He had to backtrack immediately to account for the most famous and most acclaimed poet in America, Phillis Wheatley, who was, very unfortunately for Jefferson’s argument, unquestionably black. She had been brought to Boston as an enslaved African at the age of about six, learned English and Latin as a child, and began writing poetry as a teenager. Her published works earned accolades on both sides of the Atlantic. Among her admirers were Voltaire, who praised Wheatley’s “very good English verse,” George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and even the naval hero John Paul Jones, who addressed her as “the celebrated Phillis the African favorite of the Nine [Muses] and Apollo” when he sent her some of his own verses. Dr. Rush cited her as a proof of black ability, listing her accomplishments when he wrote in 1775, “We have many well attested anecdotes of as sublime and disinterested virtue among them as ever adorned a Roman or a Christian character.”14 Franklin went to see Wheatley when she was in London, a literary celebrity on book tour. The acclaim irked Jefferson: “The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”15

RUSH, BENJAMIN. An Account of the Manners of the German Inhabitants of Pennsylvania (Written, 1789). Notes by I. D. Rupp. Philadelphia: 1875.

In the next two years he would sit on ninety committees, chairing twenty-five. No other congressman came even remotely close to carrying such a heavy work load. Soon he was acknowledged “to be the first man in the House,” as Benjamin Rush reported.28

Capt. Lewis is brave, prudent, habituated to the woods, and familiar with Indian manners and character,” Jefferson told Benjamin Rush.95 Lewis asked William Clark, George Rogers Clark’s brother, to join him in organizing what became known as the Corps of Volunteers for North West Discovery.96 Jefferson thought of America as an “empire of liberty.” Now he would have a keener, more detailed grasp of the continent that stretched far beyond the nation’s existing borders—and a chance at claiming that sprawling West.

IT WOULD BE USELESS FOR US TO DENOUNCE THE SERVITUDE TO WHICH THE PARLIAMENT OF GREAT BRITAIN WISHES TO REDUCE US, WHILE WE CONTINUE TO KEEP OUR FELLOW CREATURES IN SLAVERY JUST BECAUSE THEIR COLOR IS DIFFERENT FROM OURS. —SIGNER OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE DR. BENJAMIN RUSH, WHO PURCHASED WILLIAM GRUBBER IN 1776 AND DID NOT FREE HIM UNTIL 1794

A few decades ago, it was Benjamin Rush claiming ‘Negritude’ was a form of leprosy. Now anyone who resists slavery must have a disease.

We lack space here to discuss in detail the pros and cons of market forecasting. A great deal of brain power goes into this field, and undoubtedly some people can make money by being good stock-market analysts. But it is absurd to think that the general public can ever make money out of market forecasts. For who will buy when the general public, at a given signal, rushes to sell out at a profit? If you, the reader, expect to get rich over the years by following some system or leadership in market forecasting, you must be expecting to try to do what countless others are aiming at, and to be able to do it better than your numerous competitors in the market. There is no basis either in logic or in experience for assuming that any typical or average investor can anticipate market movements more successfully than the general public, of which he is himself a part. There is one aspect of the “timing” philosophy which seems to have escaped everyone’s notice. Timing is of great psychological importance to the speculator because he wants to make his profit in a hurry. The idea of waiting a year before his stock moves up is repugnant to him. But a waiting period, as such, is of no consequence to the investor. What advantage is there to him in having his money uninvested until he receives some (presumably) trustworthy signal that the time has come to buy? He enjoys an advantage only if by waiting he succeeds in buying later at a sufficiently lower price to offset his loss of dividend income. What this means is that timing is of no real value to the investor unless it coincides with pricing—that is, unless it enables him to repurchase his shares at substantially under his previous selling price.

All of Takaki’s representative American figures—Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, Andrew Jackson, and George Custer—appear as classic degenerates, sexually twisted and driven by dark obsessions and profound psychological weaknesses.

All of Takaki’s representative American figures—Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, Andrew Jackson, and George Custer—appear as classic degenerates, sexually twisted and driven by dark obsessions and profound psychological weaknesses. The American founders were sick in mind and body, Takaki implies, while their “external aggressiveness signified inner torment.

But before you assume that he is saying something akin to “Yes, please legislate Christian values!,” consider these quotes by the same man. Nothing is more dreaded than the National Government meddling with Religion. —John Adams in a letter to Benjamin Rush in 1812 Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses. —John Adams, writing in his three-volume polemic titled A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America

Partisanship had grown so fierce even treatments for the disease became politicized. There were now “Republican” and “Federalist” cures. Jeffersonian Benjamin Rush, acknowledged the finest doctor in town if not the country, used the time-honored if incorrect practices of bleeding and purging. Alexander Hamilton and his family were stricken just when an old friend from Nevis, Dr. Edward Stevens, was visiting. A veteran of “Yellow Jack” outbreaks in the Caribbean, Stevens administered large doses of “Peruvian bark”—quinine—laced with burnt cinnamon and a nightcap of laudanum. The treatment worked, but Rush, an ardent Republican, dismissed it and went right on bleeding patients, which Stevens believed medieval. Rush’s backyard was soon so drenched with blood that he indirectly began to breed countless flies, while his property gave off a “sickening sweet stench” to passersby.

Prior to the appearance of punitive incarceration, such punishment was designed to have its most profound effect not so much on the person punished as on the crowd of spectators. Punishment was, in essence, public spectacle. Reformers such as John Howard in England and Benjamin Rush in Pennsylvania argued that punishment—if carried out in isolation, behind the walls of the prison—would cease to be revenge and would actually reform those who had broken the law.

Benjamin Rush, the eighteenth-century founder of the disease concept of alcoholism, also thought that lying, murder, and political dissent were diseases.

Mad-doctors blamed drunkenness in their aetiologies of insanity, and, not surprisingly, many practitioners commented upon the evils of the ‘gin craze’. Even so, Trotter's treatise seems to have been the first book-length analysis of drunkenness by a British doctor – though it should not be forgotten that the American, Benjamin Rush's influential An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits Upon the Human Body (1785), had already appeared, a work to which Trotter curiously seems never to refer. 20

Throughout most of his life, Washington’s physical vigor had been one of his most priceless assets. A notch below six feet four and slightly above two hundred pounds, he was a full head taller than his male contemporaries. (John Adams claimed that the reason Washington was invariably selected to lead every national effort was that he was always the tallest man in the room.) A detached description of his physical features would have made him sound like an ugly, misshapen oaf: pockmarked face, decayed teeth, oversized eye sockets, massive nose, heavy in the hips, gargantuan hands and feet. But somehow, when put together and set in motion, the full package conveyed sheer majesty. As one of his biographers put it, his body did not just occupy space; it seemed to organize the space around it. He dominated a room not just with his size, but with an almost electric presence. “He has so much martial dignity in his deportment,” observed Benjamin Rush, “that there is not a king in Europe but would look like a valet de chambre by his side.”10 Not only did bullets and shrapnel seem to veer away from his body in battle, not only did he once throw a stone over the Natural Bridge in the Shenandoah Valley, which was 215 feet high, not only was he generally regarded as the finest horseman in Virginia, the rider who led the pack in most fox hunts, he also possessed for most of his life a physical constitution that seemed immune to disease or injury. Other soldiers came down with frostbite after swimming ice-choked rivers. Other statesmen fell by the wayside, lacking the stamina to handle the relentless political pressure. Washington suffered none of these ailments. Adams said that Washington had “the gift of taciturnity,” meaning he had an instinct for the eloquent silence. This same principle held true on the physical front. His medical record was eloquently empty.11

Let us return to Benjamin Rush, who foresaw the revolutionary implications of Benjamin [Lay]'s philosophy. Writing after the abolitionist movement had burst into existence during the "age of revolution," Rush was acutely conscious that Benjamin had been a lonely fighter against slavery for forty long years, suffering endless persecution, ridicule, and repression, without a movement to support and sustain him. Rush saw that his very survival took rare strength, confidence, certitude, and character. He sought to turn the experience into an object lesson for activists of his own time. The "benefactors of mankind," he continued, must not "despair, if they do not see the fruits of their benevolent proportions, or undertakings, during their lives." Wherever the "seed of truth or virtue" is planted, it will "preserve and carry with it the principle of life." Some seeds bear fruit quickly, Rush explained, but the "most valuable of them, like the venerable oak, are centuries in the growing." Like the fearless Benjamin Lay, these giant oaks do not wither. "They exist and bloom for ever.

the above quote by Charles Thomson (as recorded by Benjamin Rush and written in “Rulers of Evil” by Tupper Saussy), “Founding Father” and Secretary of the Continental Congress, admitting the American Revolution and its American Revolutionary War were hoaxed deceptions for Americans who

Another school which benefited from Dr. Rush’s influence was Franklin College (today called Franklin-Marshall College). The original founders of that college were a distinguished group, including not only Dr. Rush but also Thomas McKean (signer of the Declaration), Thomas Mifflin (signer of the Constitution), and George Clymer, Robert Morris, and Dr. Franklin (signers of both the Declaration and the Constitution). All of them believed that the inclusion of religious education was fundamental to a sound education.

Dr. Rush was firm in his belief that education, to be successful, must infuse the principles of Christianity throughout all of its academic disciplines. In fact, when he presented his plan for universal public education on March 28, 1787, he explained:

Let the children who are sent to those schools be taught to read and write. . . . [and a]bove all, let both sexes be carefully instructed in the principles and obligations of the Christian religion. This is the most essential part of education – this will make them dutiful children, teachable scholars, and, afterwards, good apprentices, good husbands, good wives, honest mechanics, industrious farmers, peaceable sailors, and, in everything that relates to this country, good citizens.

The great enemy of the salvation of man, in my opinion, never invented a more effectual means of extirpating [extinguishing] Christianity from the world than by persuading mankind that it was improper to read the Bible at schools.25 Dr.

That the Bible contains more knowledge necessary to man in his present state than any other book in the world.

As she waitress hurried off toward the back, I turned to look at Gemma and grinned. “Benjamin? The full name, Gems? Was that really necessary?” She leaned in and laughed. “A girl’s gotta have some fun.” “Well, I could think of a few ways to aid in that cause.” Blood rushed to Gemma’s cheeks as she glanced around, apparently to make sure no one had been paying us any mind. Fortunately for her, no one else was within earshot, allowing her to relax. Still, it didn’t take away from my pleasure of seeing her squirm in her seat. Although she wouldn’t admit it aloud, I knew Gemma’s mind had gone there, too. “Will you behave? This is a fine-dining establishment,” she quipped. “You’re adorable.” I leaned over, somewhat hanging off the stool, and pressed a quick kiss to her cheek. “Now let’s get you some pizza, shall we?” “I knew there was a reason I loved you.

By removing the Bible from schools, we would be wasting so much time and money in punishing criminals and so little pains to prevent crime. Take the Bible out of our schools and there would be an explosion in crime. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence

Because we’re disconnected from our Future Selves, we opt for near immediate goals or dopamine hits. This short-term seeking ends up costing our Future Selves big. [Example of this, from comedian Jerry Seinfeld] Late at night, I think, “Well, it’s night, I’m having a good time, I don’t want to go to sleep. I’m Night Guy. Getting up after five hours’ sleep? That’s Morning Guy’s problem. Let him worry about that. I’m Night Guy, I’ve got to party.” Then you get up after five hours of sleep, you’re cranky, you’re exhausted. Night Guy always screws Morning Guy.

Next to alcoholism, what intrigued and horrified Rush most in his rounds were the patients locked in the basement cells. He felt immediately that the circumstances these patients lived under were absolutely unacceptable. But the “lunatics,” who most people still viewed as damned rather than diseased, presented a unique and troubling situation. They weren’t truly in the hospital to be treated, because nobody knew for sure what their treatment should be. They were in the basement primarily to keep them safe from society, and society safe from them. The first step in improving their situation would simply involve warehousing them more benevolently. But even that proposition was challenging; nobody seemed to have the slightest idea how to proceed.

Benjamin Rush, in an eloquent first speech in Congress, declared, “The more a man aims at serving America the more he serves his colony.” “We have been too free with the word independence. We are dependent on each other—not totally independent states. . . . When I entered that door, I considered myself a citizen of America.

Once the class was over, I wanted to speak with Benjamin a little more, but he needed to rush home and get cleaned up before heading off to work.  As the manager of a pet store in

But my Friend there is something very serious in this Business. The Holy Ghost carries on the whole Christian system in this earth. Not a Baptism, not a Marriage not a Sacrament can be administered but by the Holy Ghost, who is transmitted from age to age by laying the hands of the Bishops on the heads of Candidates for the Ministry. In the same manner as the holy Ghost is transmitted from Monarch to Monarch by the holy Oil in the vial at Rheims which was brought down from Heaven by a Dove and by that other Phyal which I have seen in the Tower of London. There is no Authority civil or religious: there can be no legitimate Government but what is administered by this Holy Ghost. There can be no salvation without it. All, without it is Rebellion and Perdition, or in more orthodox words Damnation. Although this is all Artifice and Cunning in the secret original in the heart, yet they all believe it so sincerely that they would lay down their Lives under the Ax or the fiery Fagot for it. Alas the poor weak ignorant Dupe human Nature.

But Wheatley’s achievements still proved a point, that Black people weren’t dumb, and this information became ammo for people who were antislavery. People like Benjamin Rush, a physician from Philadelphia who wrote a pamphlet saying that Black people weren’t born savages but instead were made savages by slavery. Record scratch. PAUSE.

Dr. R. observed that we should talk a great deal with deranged patients; and we should always in the early & violent stages of mania, seem to agree with their notions. We should admit their premises, but draw a different inference; which may generally be done. To oppose them at first would be like opposing a northeast storm.

In contrast, abolitionists, including Benjamin Rush in 1773, argued, “All the vices which are charged upon the Negroes in the southern colonies and the West-Indies, such as Idleness, Treachery, Theft, and the like, are the genuine offspring of slavery.” A year later, Rush founded the budding nation’s first White antislavery society.

in 1775 there arose a remarkable civic society that aimed to end slavery itself. The society was formed not by Johnson, nor in Johnson’s vaunted London, nor indeed anywhere in Britain proper, but rather in Philadelphia, the host city of the Continental Congress. Two of the society’s early leaders were Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush, who both, in the summer of 1776, added their names to the American Declaration of Independence.

Keep in mind that when we were founded by those Americans of the eighteenth century, non had had any prior experience in revolutions or nation making. They were, as we would say, winging it. They were idealistic and they were young. We see their faces in the old paintings done later in their lives or looking at us from the paper money in our wallets, and we see the awkward teeth and the powdered hair, and we think of them as elder statesmen. But George Washington, when he took command of the Continental Army at Cambridge in 1775, was forty-three, and he was the oldest of them. Jefferson was thirty-three when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. John Adams was forty. Benjamin Rush - one of the most interesting of them all - was thirty when he signed the Declaration. They were young people, feeling their way, improvising, trying to do what would work. They had no money, no navy, no real army. There wasn't a bank in the entire country. It was a country of just 2,500,000 people, 500,000 of whom were held in slavery. And think of this: Few nations in the world know when they were born. We know exactly when we began and why we began and who did it.

The idea of government separate from religion was floating around during the Enlightenment. John Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and the greats of the day discussed it. But while other ideas in political science had real-world antecedents on which the founders could rely, there was no example of a truly secular government. No other nation had sought to protect the ability of its citizens to think freely by separating the government from religion and religion from the government. Until the theory was put into practice, true freedom of thought and even freedom of religion could not have existed. The United States realized those concepts because it embarked “upon a great and noble experiment…hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent—that of total separation of Church and State,” according to President John Tyler.46 America was the first nation to try this experiment; it invented the separation of state and church. Pulitzer Prize–winning author Garry Wills put it nicely: That [separation], more than anything else, made the United States a new thing on earth, setting new tasks for religion, offering it new opportunities. Everything else in our Constitution—separation of powers, balanced government, bicameralism, federalism—had been anticipated both in theory and practice…. But we invented nothing, except disestablishment. No other government in history had launched itself without the help of officially recognized gods and their state-connected ministers.47 Americans should celebrate this “great American principle of eternal separation.”48 It’s ours. It’s an American original. We ought to be proud of that contribution to the world, not bury it under myths. The founders’ private religious beliefs are far less important to the Judeo-Christian question than their views on separating state and church and the actions they took to divorce those two institutions. They were as close to consensus on separating the two as they were on any subject. In the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published the same year that America declared independence, historian Edward Gibbon wrote that “the various forms of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people to be equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.”49 Most of the founders agreed with Gibbon and recognized that religion can be exploited for political gain and that religion, when it has civil power, is often deadly. These beliefs were common among the founders, but not universal. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration, believed that “the Christian religion should be preferred to all others” and that “every family in the United States [should] be furnished at public expense…with a copy of an American edition of the BIBLE.”50 However, in spite of, or likely because of, their divergent religious beliefs and backgrounds, the founders thought that separation made sense.

MPD [Dissociative Identity Disorder] is one of the oldest Western psychiatric diagnoses. We have clearly described cases dating back two or more centuries. In addition to the contributions of Pierre Janet, Monon Prince, and others, we have descriptions of early MPD cases by such important historical figures as Benjamin Rush, father of U.S. psychiatry (Carlson, 1981). Thus MPD is consistent across time and cultures; such a claim can be documented for few other psychiatric disorders. And, as this book demonstrates, MPD and other forms of pathological dissociation are found in children and have features that fit with developmental data and theories. Criticisms of the existence of MPD often appear to be directed more at the mass media stereotype described earlier than at the actual condition.

Slowly and steadily, as the rush to “gain the benefits” of meditation fades away and the depth of the experience itself becomes apparent, your patience will strengthen and your need to be “moving on to the next moment” will begin to recede.

But her first instincts had been right. He was a good husband, a wonderful father and stepfather. He brought her a cup of tea in bed every morning and rubbed her feet at night when she was tired. And they’d made beautiful children together, she thought fondly, as she put Jacob’s breakfast on the high chair in front of him. Both their sons were a perfect blend of the two of them, with ruddy chestnut hair and hazel eyes. Only Emily looked like she didn’t belong. She was growing more like her biological father with every passing year. As she stirred the lumps out of Jacob’s cereal, Maddie felt an unexpected rush of tears. She blinked them back, cursing the pregnancy hormones that left her so vulnerable. Emily’s father, Benjamin, had been her first boyfriend, a veterinary student in his final year at the same college as she when they’d met. Quiet and painfully shy, Maddie had always found it hard to make friends, having been raised by a widowed mother too busy with her charitable causes to have time to show Maddie how to have fun. At twenty-one, she’d never even been on a date until Benjamin asked her to join him at a lecture about animal husbandry. Somehow, Benjamin had got under her skin. Theirs had been a gentle, low-key relationship, a slow burn born of shared interests and companionship. It wasn’t love, exactly, but it was warm and reassuring and safe. Eight months after they’d met, she’d lost her virginity to him in an encounter that, like the relationship itself, was unremarkable but quietly satisfying. The pregnancy a year later had been a complete accident. To her surprise, Benjamin had been thrilled. They’d both graduated college by then, and while she made next to nothing at the sanctuary, he was earning enough as a small animal vet to look after them both. He bought dozens of books on fatherhood and had picked out names – Emily for a girl, Charlie for a boy – before Maddie had been for her first scan. He was so excited about becoming a