Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/75

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R U S R U S 63 and when the medical college, which he had helped to found, was absorbed by the university of Pennsylvania in 1791 he became professor of the institutes of medicine and of clinical practice, succeeding in 1805 to the chair of the theory and practice of physic. He was the central figure in the medical world of Philadelphia, as Cullen was at Edinburgh and Boerhaave at Leyden. Much of his influence and success was due to his method and regularity of life on the Franklin model. During the thirty years that he attended the Pennsylvania Hospital as physician, he is said to have never missed his daily visit and never to have been more than ten minutes late. Notwithstanding a weak chest, which troubled him the greater part of his life, he got through an enormous amount of work, literary and other ; he was a systematic early riser, and his leisure at the end of the day was spent in reading poetry, history, the moral sciences, and the like, with his pen always in his hand. His temperament was of the gentle sort, and his conversation and correspondence abounding in ideas. It is stated by his friend Dr Hosack of New York, that Rush was successively a Quaker, an Anabaptist, a Presbyterian, and an Anglican. He gained great credit when the yellow fever devastated Philadelphia, in 1793, by his assiduity in visiting the sick (as many as one hundred and twenty in a day), and by his bold and apparently success- ful treatment of the disease by bloodletting. When he began to prosper in practice, he gave a seventh part of his income in charity. He died in 1813, after a five days' illness from typhus fever. Nine out of a family of thirteen children survived him, all prosperously settled. Rush's writings cover an immense range of subjects, including language, the study of Latin and Greek, the moral faculty, capital punishment, medicine among the American Indians, maple sugar, the blackness of the negro, the cause of animal life, tobacco smoking, spirit drinking, as well as a long list of more strictly professional topics. His last work was an elaborate treatise on the Diseases of the Mind (1812). He is best known now by the five volumes of Medical Inquiries and Observations, which he brought out at intervals from 1789 to 1798 (two later editions revised by the author). Epidemiology, and yellow fever in parti- cular, was the subject on which he wrote to most purpose. His treatment of yellow fever by bloodletting helped more than any- thing else to make him famous, although the practice would now be condemned. His views as to the origin and diffusion of yellow fever have a more permanent interest. He stoutly maintained, as against the doctrine of importation from the West Indies, that the yellow fever of Philadelphia was generated on the spot by noxious exhalations, although he does not appear to have suspected that there was something special or specific in the filthy conditions of soil or harbour mud which gave rise to the miasmata. For a number of years he expressed the opinion that yellow fever might become catching from person to person, under certain aggravated circumstances ; but in the end he professed the doctrine of absolute non-contagiousness. He became well known in Europe as an authority on the epidemics of fever, and was elected an honorary member of several foreign societies. See eulogy by Hosack (Essays, i., New York, 1824), with biographical details taken from a letter of Rush to President John Adams ; also references in the works of Thncker, Gross, and Bowditch on the history of medicine in America. His part in the yellow fever controversies is indicated by La Roche (Yellow Fever in Philadelphia from 1699 to 185k, 2 vols., Philadelphia, 185S) and by Bancroft (Essay on the Yellow Fever, London, 1811). His serrices as an aboli- tionist pioneer are recorded in Clarkson's History of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade. RUSHWORTH, JOHN (c. 1607-1690), the compiler of the Historical Collections commonly described by his name, was born in Northumberland about the year 1607. After a period of study at Oxford, but not, it appears, as a member of the university, he came to London, was entered at Lincoln's Inn, and was in due course called to the bar. As early as 1 630 he seems to have commenced attendance at the courts, especially the Star Chamber and the Exchequer Chamber, not for the purpose of practising his profession, but in order that he might observe and record the more remarkable of their proceedings. On the meeting of the Long Parliament in 1640 he was appointed assistant clerk to the House of Commons, and was in the habit of making short-hand notes of the speeches he heard de- livered in debate. He himself states that it was from his report that the words used by Charles I. during his memorable attempt to seize the "five members" were printed for public distribution under the king's orders. Being an expert horseman, it seems that Rushworth was frequently employed by the House as their messenger as well as in the capacity of clerk. When the king left London, and while the earl of Essex was general, he was often the bearer of communications from the parliament to one or the other of them. In 1645 Sir Thomas Fairfax, to whom he was distantly related, and who was then in command of the Parliamentary forces, made him his secretary, and he remained with the army almost continuously until 1650. In 1649 he was at Oxford, and the degree of master of arts was conferred on him by the university. In 1652 he was nominated one of the commissioners for the reform of the common law, and in 1658 he was elected member for Berwick in the parliament of the commonwealth. Almost immediately before the Restoration he published the first volume of his Historical Collections, which had been sub- mitted in manuscript to Oliver Cromwell, with a very laudatory dedication to Richard Cromwell, then Lord Protector. But the turn of events induced him to with- draw this dedication, and he subsequently endeavoured without success to conciliate Charles II. by presenting him with some of the registers of the privy council which had come into his possession. In the convention of 1660, which recalled the king, he sat again as member for Berwick. In 1677 he was made secretary to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, then lord keeper, and he was returned for Berwick a third and a fourth time to the parliaments of 1679 and 1681. Soon after this he appears to have fallen into straitened circumstances. In 1684 he was arrested for debt, and cast into the King's Bench prison, where he died, after lingering for some time in a condition of mental infirmity, the result of excessive drinking, in 1690. Rushworth's Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, Weighty Matters in Law, and Remarkable Proceedings in Parlia- ment was reprinted in eight folio volumes in 1721. The eighth volume of this edition is an account of the trial of the earl of Stratford, the other seven volumes being concerned with the miscellaneous transactions of the period from 1618 to 1648. Only the first three volumes and the trial of Strafford were originally published in Rushworth's lifetime ; but the manuscript of the other volumes was left by him ready for the press. The extreme value of the work is well known to all inquirers into the history of the Civil War, and much of the information it contains is to be found nowhere else. Its impartiality, however, can hardly be seriously maintained, and hence it is necessary to consult it with some caution. EUSSELL, JOHN RUSSELL, EARL (1792-1878), a statesman who for nearly half a century faithfully repre- sented the traditions of Whig politics, was the third son of John, sixth duke of Bedford, and was born in Hertford Street, Mayfair, London, 18th August 1792, one of the most terrible months in the apnals of the French Revolu- tion. Whilst still a child he was sent to a private school at Sunbury, and for a short time he was at Westminster School. Long and severe illness led to his being placed, with many other young men sprung from Whig parents, with a private tutor at Woodnesborough in Kent. Following in the footsteps of Lord Henry Petty, Brougham, and Horner, he went to the university of Edinburgh, then the academic centre of Liberalism, and dwelt in the house of Prof. Playfair, whom he afterwards described as "one of the best and noblest, the most upright, the most bene- volent, and the most liberal of all philosophers." On leaving the university, he determined upon taking a foreign tour, and, as the greater part of Europe was overrun by French troops, he landed at Lisbon with the intention of exploring the countries of Portugal and Spain. Lord John