Benjamin Rush in Edinburgh: An American Doctor's Scottish Education

established claims rest on Rush's letters (edited by L. H. Butterfield, 1951), his Autobiography written around 1800 (edited by G. W. Corner, 1948), his Edinburgh journal of 1766–68, Franklin's papers, and institutional records at Edinburgh, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Dickinson. shared claims are sound on the facts but depend on interpretation, especially Andrew Hook's argument in Scotland and America (1975) about the lasting influence of Edinburgh on Rush and America. traditional claims are repeated without a firm source.

Two weaknesses matter. First, much of what we know about Rush's Edinburgh years comes from Rush himself, and the Autobiography was written more than thirty years later by a man keen to explain his own life. Second, his Edinburgh journal survives in the original at Indiana University and as a typed transcript at Edinburgh, but it has not been published in full. Biographers such as David Freeman Hawke (1971) have used it; this article relies on Hook and on the edited letters and has not checked the journal directly.

Why Edinburgh

established By the 1760s Edinburgh had the most admired medical school in the English-speaking world, and it was the obvious choice for an ambitious American. Andrew Hook, in Scotland and America (1975), puts the number of Americans who studied at Edinburgh before the Revolution at about a hundred, far more than at any other British university. Of the 393 medical degrees Edinburgh awarded up to 1776, 42 went to Americans. Rush recorded fourteen Americans studying medicine there in his time.

established Rush had local reasons too. His Philadelphia teacher John Redman had studied in Europe and urged him to go. John Morgan and William Shippen, Edinburgh graduates, had just opened the College of Philadelphia's medical school in 1765, on the Edinburgh pattern. Morgan promised Rush a place in it on his return. And Benjamin Franklin, then in London, had been steering young Americans to Edinburgh since he advised Morgan to go there in 1760.

Arrival and welcome

established Rush and Potts sailed on 31 August 1766 and reached Liverpool on 21 October. From there they wrote to Franklin asking for recommendations. Franklin's letters to Sir Alexander Dick and others went ahead of them to Edinburgh, and they carried Morgan's own letters to Cullen. On 16 November 1766 Rush told Morgan how Cullen had received them. The professor said that teaching and practice left him little time for hospitality, but that young men recommended by Morgan "may always depend upon my immediate patronage and friendship" (as quoted by Hook).

established Like every visitor, Rush was struck by the dirt of the Old Town, where household waste was still thrown from windows at night after the cry of "gardy-loo". In December 1766 he reported that Potts had already received this kind of "naturalization", while he himself had so far escaped (as quoted by Hook). Potts later had to go home before taking his degree.

Teachers

established Rush studied under William Cullen, Alexander Monro secundus (anatomy), Joseph Black (chemistry), John Gregory (practice of medicine), James Russell (natural philosophy) and John Hope (botany). He attended Black's chemistry lectures in two successive years. He joined the students' Medical Society. Cullen was the dominant influence: biographers agree that in Edinburgh Rush shifted his allegiance to Cullen's system, which placed the nervous system at the centre of health and disease.

established Cullen had a reputation for special kindness to Americans. The Philadelphian Thomas Parke, who arrived in 1771 with letters from Morgan and Rush, called him "yt shining Oracle of Physic" (as quoted by Hook).

The thesis

established Rush graduated M.D. in June 1768. His thesis, written in Latin as Edinburgh required, was De coctione ciborum in ventriculo, "On the digestion of food in the stomach". He experimented on himself, making himself vomit after set meals to examine what his stomach had done to them, and concluded that the stomach's acidity came from fermentation. He was wrong, and accepted it only in 1804 after experiments by his own student John R. Young.

established Rush dedicated the thesis chiefly to Franklin, and secondarily to a group of other men, mostly physicians. On 22 March 1768 Franklin agreed, though he suggested that an inaugural oration might better be dedicated to the teachers who had taught him most. The dedication also caused a small quarrel: Rush named Shippen before Morgan and had to write to Morgan to explain.

Society: Hume, Robertson, Blacklock and the Levens

established Franklin's introductions let Rush move in Edinburgh society beyond the lecture rooms. Hook records that he met David Hume at least once while dining with Sir Alexander Dick, and Principal William Robertson at Dr Gregory's. He often met the blind poet Thomas Blacklock, whose house took in medical students from England, Ireland and America. Through Mrs Thomas Hogg, wife of his banker, he was introduced to the family of the Earl of Leven. He also became a lasting friend of the Rev. Dr John Erskine, the evangelical minister who corresponded with American divines. Dickinson College's archives record that Rush also met Charles Nisbet, minister of Montrose, during his Edinburgh years.

established The Leven friendship had a sad sequel. The earl's son, Captain William Leslie, served with the British army in America and was killed at the Battle of Princeton on 3 January 1777. American troops buried him at Pluckemin, New Jersey, and Rush, who mourned him, paid for a headstone after the war. In 1784 the Countess of Leven wrote that Rush's name, "upon one particular account", would ever be dear to her family (as quoted by Hook). Hook dates the battle to 1776; it was fought on 3 January 1777.

shared Rush's Autobiography says that in Edinburgh a fellow student, John Bostock, first led him to question hereditary monarchy, and that this was the beginning of his republican views. The account comes only from Rush's memoir, written decades later, and has not been checked against the journal for this article.

Recruiting Witherspoon

established The College of New Jersey had lost five presidents to death in twenty years and was caught in the quarrel between the Old Side and New Side Presbyterians. In 1766 its New Side trustees chose John Witherspoon, minister of the Laigh Kirk in Paisley and a leader of the Popular, evangelical party in the Church of Scotland. The trustee Richard Stockton, then in Britain, and Rush, Princeton class of 1760, acted as the college's agents in Scotland.

established Witherspoon was tempted, but his wife Elizabeth refused to go. She saw New Jersey as the end of the earth and feared being widowed far from her family with young children. For a time Witherspoon proposed others for the post, including Thomas Randall of Perthshire and Charles Nisbet of Montrose. Stockton, Rush and Witherspoon's Scottish friends kept up their appeals. In the end Mrs Witherspoon changed her mind, and the family sailed for Philadelphia in May 1768, a month before Rush graduated. Hook calls the negotiations "a perfect microcosm" of the ties between Scotland and America before the Revolution.

established The appointment mattered. Witherspoon brought the Scottish teaching of moral philosophy and rhetoric to Princeton, which became one of the most influential colleges in America; his pupils included James Madison. Rush later wrote that Witherspoon "gave a new turn to education, and spread taste and correctness in literature throughout the United States" (as quoted by Hook). Witherspoon, Stockton and Rush all signed the Declaration of Independence. Rush married Stockton's daughter Julia.

Leaving Scotland

established Rush ended his Edinburgh journal on 23 June 1768. In July he wrote to Morgan: "the happiest period of my life is now near over. My halcyon days have been spent in Edinburgh" (as quoted by Hook). Around 1800 he wrote in his Autobiography: "The two years I spent in Edinburgh I consider as the most important in their influence upon my character and conduct of any period of my life." The University of Edinburgh quotes the same words on its page about his plaque.

established He spent the following months in London, at the Middlesex and St Thomas's hospitals with William Hunter and William Hewson, and met Sir John Pringle, John Fothergill and, through Sir Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith. In January 1769, probably through the Edinburgh-trained Virginian Arthur Lee, he dined with John Wilkes in the King's Bench Prison. Wilkes, he reported, "spoke with as much virulence as ever against Scotland", because all the Scottish members of Parliament were against America (as quoted by Hook). Early in 1769 Franklin sent him to Paris with letters of introduction and money for the trip.

Black's chemistry in Philadelphia

established Rush returned to Philadelphia in 1769 and on 1 August was appointed professor of chemistry at the College of Philadelphia, a post he held until 1789. In 1770 he published a Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on Chemistry, often called the first American chemistry textbook. It follows the outline of Black's Edinburgh course closely, though Rush did not copy Black's use of experimental demonstrations, and about a quarter of it covers pharmaceutical chemistry.

Cullen's medicine in America, and its price

established Rush's later teaching of the theory and practice of medicine, which he took up in 1789 and continued in various chairs until his death, began from Cullen. He then narrowed Cullen's emphasis on the nervous system to the excitability of the arteries, and attacked Cullen's nosology, the classification of diseases into many separate kinds. Rush argued that there was in effect "only one disease in the world", a morbid excitement of the blood vessels, with many forms.

established This theory justified drastic treatment. In the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793, which killed some four to five thousand people, Rush bled patients heavily and purged them with calomel and jalap. He worked tirelessly and caught the fever himself. His methods were attacked at the time, notably by the journalist William Cobbett, whom Rush sued successfully for libel in 1799.

shared How far to blame Edinburgh is a matter of judgement. Rush's system was his own, and he rejected much of Cullen. But the habit of building a single explanatory system of disease, and the authority with which he taught it to thousands of American students, were part of the Edinburgh inheritance he and his colleagues brought home.

Dickinson College and Charles Nisbet

established In 1783 Rush drew up the charter that turned a grammar school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, into Dickinson College, signed on 9 September 1783. He named it after John Dickinson, President of Pennsylvania. At their first meeting in Carlisle in 1784 the trustees elected Charles Nisbet of Montrose as principal. Rush had known him in Scotland. He also knew that Witherspoon had once proposed Nisbet for Princeton, that Nisbet was famous as "the walking library", and that he had supported the Americans during the war.

established Rush's letters promised Nisbet that Dickinson could not fail to become the first college in America. The Countess of Leven, among others, advised caution. Nisbet sailed from Greenock on 23 April 1785, reached Philadelphia on 9 June and Carlisle on 4 July. In Scotland the Edinburgh bookseller William Creech attacked him in the press as an encourager of emigration. Carlisle disappointed him: the buildings were inadequate, the funds uncertain and his family fell ill. He resigned in October 1785, but no ship was available, and on 9 May 1786 he was unanimously re-elected. He stayed until his death on 18 January 1804, teaching logic, the philosophy of the mind, moral philosophy and belles-lettres, and quarrelling with Rush.

shared Hook calls the episode emblematic of the continuity of Scottish influence before and after the Revolution, and Nisbet's courses show the Scottish curriculum transplanted. Hook suggests the belles-lettres course used Hugh Blair's Lectures, but notes that no list of Dickinson textbooks survives.

The 1786 plan for schools

established In 1786 Rush published A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools and the Diffusion of Knowledge in Pennsylvania, later reprinted in his Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical (1798). He proposed free schools "in every township, or in districts consisting of one hundred families", teaching reading, writing and arithmetic in English and German, with one university in the state capital and four colleges at Philadelphia, Carlisle, Lancaster and later Pittsburgh. He said the plan drew on methods that "have long been used with success in Scotland, and in the eastern states of America", meaning New England. He preferred several small colleges to one or two large ones, praising "the more numerous, and less crouded universities and colleges in Scotland" over Oxford and Cambridge, which he called "the seats of dissipation". He argued that schools would lessen taxes by reducing crime.

established Hook notes that the pamphlet was reprinted in Edinburgh's Scots Magazine, and he reads it as showing "the kind of enduring influence that might result from a period of study in Scotland". Pennsylvania did not adopt a general free-school system until 1834.

Letters to his son

established Rush's son James, born in 1786, graduated from Princeton in 1805 and took his M.D. at Pennsylvania in 1809, then went to Edinburgh for further study. Rush gave him letters of introduction to the Earl of Buchan, the publisher William Creech and Cullen's daughter, which shows that his Scottish friendships had lasted forty years. In 1809 he described Edinburgh to James as "the most rational and perhaps the most enlightened city in the world". In 1810 he told him that there was perhaps "no spot upon the earth where religion, science, and literature combine more to produce moral and intellectual pleasures than in the metropolis of Scotland" (both as quoted by Hook). He also recommended Benjamin Silliman's popular account of his 1805–06 stay in Edinburgh as a model for James's journal.

established Silliman, the Yale chemist, met Scots in Edinburgh who still remembered Rush with admiration, including a friend of both Rush and Witherspoon. James Rush went on to write The Philosophy of the Human Voice (1827), a pioneering study of speech.

What Edinburgh gave him

shared Hook treats Rush as the clearest case of an American who came to Scotland to learn and carried the results home, and Rush's own words support that reading. The Edinburgh connection shaped his teaching of chemistry and medicine, his network of friends, his choice of Witherspoon and Nisbet, and his model for schools. Other historians of the period, such as Douglas Sloan (1971) and Henry May (1976), have weighed Scottish ideas against English, Dissenting and home-grown currents in American education, so the size of the Scottish share remains a matter of debate. Rush's ideas on schools, for example, owed as much to New England as to Scotland, as he said himself.

• Rush experimented on himself for his thesis, making himself vomit to study digestion, and reached the wrong answer.
• He was fourteen when he graduated from Princeton and twenty-two when he took his Edinburgh M.D.
• The University of Edinburgh's plaque to Rush is on 57 George Square.
• The original of Rush's Edinburgh journal, a black leather volume marked "B. Rush", is at Indiana University; Edinburgh holds a typed transcript.
• A British officer killed fighting Washington at Princeton was the son of Rush's Edinburgh friends, and Rush paid for his gravestone.
• Rush's partner in recruiting Witherspoon, Richard Stockton, became his father-in-law.

• Myth: Captain William Leslie was killed in 1776. Andrew Hook dates the battle to 1776, but the Battle of Princeton was fought on 3 January 1777.
• Myth: Rush's thesis was a medical discovery. He concluded from experiments on himself that the stomach's acidity came from fermentation. He was wrong, and accepted it only in 1804 after experiments by his student John R. Young.
• Disputed: how far Rush's medicine was Cullen's. He learned Cullen's system in Edinburgh, then narrowed it to the excitability of the arteries and attacked Cullen's classification of diseases. How far to blame Edinburgh for his heavy bloodletting in 1793 is a matter of judgement.
• Myth: Rush alone brought Witherspoon to Princeton. Richard Stockton and Rush acted as the college's agents, and Witherspoon's Scottish friends kept up the appeals. In the end Witherspoon's wife changed her mind.
• Disputed: whether Rush's republicanism began in Edinburgh. His Autobiography says a fellow student, John Bostock, first led him to question hereditary monarchy. The account comes only from Rush's memoir, written decades later.
• Myth: Rush's 1786 school plan copied the Scottish system. He cited Scotland and the eastern states together, and his ideas on schools owed as much to New England as to Scotland, as he said himself.
• Disputed: the size of the Scottish share in American education. Historians such as Douglas Sloan and Henry May have weighed Scottish ideas against English, Dissenting and home-grown currents, so the size of the Scottish share remains a matter of debate.