Benjamin Rush (1746–1813) was born at Byberry near Philadelphia, graduated from the College of New Jersey at Princeton in 1760, and took his medical degree at Edinburgh in 1768. Returning to Philadelphia, he taught chemistry and later the institutes and practice of medicine, served as a physician at the Pennsylvania Hospital, and signed the Declaration of Independence as a Pennsylvania delegate. In 1777–1778 he served as a senior medical officer of the Continental Army's Middle Department, sat in Pennsylvania's ratifying convention of 1787, and helped found Dickinson College and the Young Ladies' Academy of Philadelphia. He treated patients through the yellow fever epidemic of 1793, was treasurer of the United States Mint from 1797, and published Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind in 1812, the year before his death.
Essays on Education in a Republic gathers the six essays on schooling that open Benjamin Rush's Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical, published in Philadelphia in 1798. Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote them between 1786 and 1791 to ask what kind of education a free people needs once it has made itself a republic.
Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind is often called the first American psychiatry textbook. Benjamin Rush gathers observations, classifications, causes, and treatments for mania, melancholy, hypochondria, derangement, moral faculties, memory, and related conditions.
