"To Make a Figure": Benjamin Rush's Rhetorical Self-Construction and Scientific Authorship

In 1765, prior to embarking on his formal study of medicine in Edinburgh, Benjamin Rush wrote to his friend Ebenezar Hazard, "I hope by hard study and longer attendance on the practice of physic to fit myself better to make a figure in Europe."¹ Rush's ambition, marked by the concern that he "make a figure," is not surprising, since the young man was not yet 20 years old and at the outset of his professional career. As he prepared to leave for Edinburgh, Rush also requested that Benjamin Franklin send ahead letters on his behalf, in order that he might be well received upon arrival (Letters 1:27). Together the comments reveal that Rush was a planner, one who set out to accomplish his goals with a specific schema in mind. Rush repeated the concept in other letters, in commonplace books kept throughout his life, and in his posthumously published autobiography, underscoring his unceasing concern with his public figure. He implicitly suggested as much in his lectures and medical texts. His drive to achieve a prominent stature must have been apparent to many around him, for even the London publisher Edward Dilly remarked upon it in 1771 when he wrote to Rush: "If your Health continues, and you possess the same vivacity which you had in England, I shall expect to hear in a short Time of your making a figure on the Western Continent, not only in the Medical World but in the republic of Letters" (qtd. in Butterfield, "American Interests," 302).

Rush's health and vivacity, indeed, enabled him to succeed at "mak[ing] a figure" in both the medical and literary worlds. Richard Shyrock proclaimed years ago that Rush was "the first medical man in the country to achieve a general literary reputation," Lyman Butterfield labeled a later period of Rush's life "Literary Fame and Domestic Tranquility," and several literary scholars have noted the impact of Rush's medical teachings upon American belles lettres of the early Republic and antebellum periods.² Yet contributing to these successes were much more than Rush's health and vivacity. The realm of medicine and the "republic of Letters," worlds Dilly distinguished simply with his rhetoric, were not so easily delineated in the day-to-day work of Rush.³ For him, as for others in America and Europe in the eighteenth century, the roles of author, physician, and man of science were merged.⁴ This tripartite identity was fostered by numerous rhetorical performances that intertwined the promotion of scientific truths and the promotion of self. This self-promotion occurred through performances not only with patients and in the lecture hall but also through the world of print.

Rush's efforts "to make a figure" provide a fascinating case study for those interested in the construction of American identities. At least since the appearances of Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-fashioning and Sacvan Bercovitch's Puritan Origins of the American Self, identity construction has engaged scholars in early American literary studies. Rush's motivations, his modes of inquiry, and his methods of writing and publishing, however, illustrate several additional topics of recent interest. Consideration of Rush's rhetorical efforts—while reinforcing claims that Rush's theories of race, madness, temperance, and female education, for example, influenced the discourses of belles lettres during his life as well as throughout the antebellum period—adds to prior studies of Rush that emphasize the social construction of scientific truths, authorship in the early Republic, and writing as a means of healing. I argue here that Rush's scientific theories emerged from his experiences, which, for his own emotional satisfaction, needed explication and justification. Among these experiences were his differences with others, who were not only those among ethnic minorities, as Dana D. Nelson has noted, but also included white men associated with the realm of science. In my examination of Rush and the writings of men of science, I explore the multiple layers and perspectives of rhetorical situations that should be considered when attempting to understand authorship in early America. The author is...