You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
is widely considered as the greatest of American physicians. An innovator, a man of scholarly tastes, extensive learning, a potent force in the American Revolution (Rebellion seems more accurate), and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, all stamp him as a man of extraordinary talent. His portrait (rather more robust than he really was) appears on the Seal of the American Psychiatric Association, founded thirty-one years after his death; Rush had no small knowledge of psychiatry among his other accomplishments.
In this volume are collected a fairly good selection of his writings, although a psychiatrist would have wished for more of Rush's psychiatry. Rush was courageous, intense and rangy, and yet scholarly and erudite, an unusual combination. He would have been exceptional in any culture or society. His ideas were well in advance of his times and modern psychiatry breathes through his pages. He seems to have skipped through nineteenth century psychiatry, directly into modern characterology. Thus he finds Cullen's nosology of mania and melancholia too confining and then gives his own nosology of mania: Negro Mania, Land Mania, Horse Mania, Liberty Mania, Monarchical Mania, Republican Mania, Donation Mania, Military Mania, Duelling Mania, Hunting Mania, Gaming Mania, Machine Mania, Alchemical Mania, Virtuoso Mania, Rambling Mania,