An unusual follow-up to the article on Benjamin Rush in our December, 1975, issue came to us from Gene DeGruson, curator of special collections at Kansas State College:
“I have in my personal collection the manuscript lectures of Dr. Benjamin Rush, delivered before the College of Philadelphia from November i, 1790, to February i, 1791. They were taken down by Elihu Hubbard Smith, a Connecticut wit, physician, poet, and naturalist, and have never been published. Unlike Dr. Rush’s published lectures, these are conversational in tone, filled with charming anecdotes and fascinating asides.”
Here, then, is Dr. Rush, speaking with cranky, eclectic complacency on love and other serious medical problems:
ON LOVE
“It is the Excess, alone of this passion, which constitutes disease.
“The Symptoms are a perpetual silence concerning, or a constant talking of the person beloved: a love of solitude, especially by moonlight, &c.
“Love, when it is successful, polishes Men, but makes Women appear awkward.
“It is a fact worth remarking that after the Passion is completely formed, the Lover, how much soever he should wish it, can never dream of his Mistress.
“Love affects both Sexes & all Ages.
“The late Gen1. Lee told me that when in a certain Village in Germany, he enquired of the Landlord what were the curiosities of the place. The Landlord told him that he had a neighbor who was an hundred & twelve years old. The Gen1, desirous to see him, went to the house. On coming to the door he found a very old Man sitting on the sill. ‘How do you do?’ says the Gen1. After this salutation … he asked him his age. ‘I am,’ replied the Old Man, ‘Eighty years old.’ ‘Eighty!’ exclaimed the Gen1.—‘I expected to hear you say you were an hundred & twelve.’ ‘No—’ returned the man—‘that is my father.’ ‘And where is he?’ ‘He is gone abroad: & I don’t much care if he never returns—for,’ added the Old Man, bursting into tears—‘he last week prevented my marrying a fine young girl and married her himself.’
“The Remote Causes [of love] are Idleness & the reading of Novels & Romances.
“The Proximate Cause is Too much Action in the Brain & Vessels of the Heart.
“Unsuccessful Love, where there is much sighing, fever, &c., is cured … by bleeding & blistering.
”… if this fails … the Lover should busy himself in looking out the defects of his mistress, in learning them by rote, & exposing her wherever he can.”
ON GOVERNMENT AND DISEASE
“In the simple ages of mankind, stimuli act chiefly on the arterial system; hence fever is produced. With the progress of Civilization; stimuli leave the arterial for the nervous system.…
“Sudden Grief, in a Peasant, will produce Fever. In the Second Rank, Melancholly. In the Highest, Syncope or sudden Death.…
“This progression of diseases serves not only to distinguish ranks in Society, but to mark the character of Nations. From the records of the Jews, we find that diseases had kept pace with their Moral & Political iniquity, so that they were ripe for that dreadful destruction imposed upon them by Jehovah.…
“We have now obtained a new Government. The minds of the people acquire daily new serenity. And if these things can be banished under the operation of our new Constitution, I will venture to predict that nervous diseases will disappear & fevers become, once more, the natural outlet of life.”
ON HYPOCHONDRIA
“I once heard of a patient who tho’t that he was dead. His Physicians laughing at him, he angrily dismissed them. He was cured by another Physician, who, humoring him and pretending to believe he was dead, proposed opening him. This proposal agitated the dead man so much that he recovered. Yet he always believed that he had been dead and that his physician had restored him to life by his great skill.”
THE RESTORATION FACTORY
Each year a million tourists visit Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, but the building there that contains the greatest collection of historic memorabilia is closed to them. It is a sometime high school that now houses the Division of Museum Services, and it is packed with artifacts from national parks throughout the country, all either awaiting or undergoing restoration to their original condition.
The division was established in 1972 to cope with the great number of National Park Service belongings that were falling prey to age or vandalism. To this repository came clocks, oil paintings, guns, tableware, carriages, and even two tents used by George Washington. (These last needed cleaning, an immense task that required the construction of a tank holding four hundred and eighty gallons of water.)
Six thousand items arrive every year, many of no great merit. As an example, Walter J. Nitkiewicz, the paintings restorer, singled out a drab canvas which had hung in a Puerto Rican fort. “Somebody’s accepted it,” he said, “and now it will take an Act of Congress to get rid of it.”
But every item, however humble, is given painstaking attention and, with the small staff—seven paid “conservators” and a few volunteers—the backlog is growing. Arthur C. Allen, the division’s chief, said, “We figure that in about two million years we’ll catch up.”
MEMENTO MORI
Among the bayonets, pipe bowls, buttons, and other familiar mementos of the American Revolution which were recently on display was one real stunner—the knucklebone from Major John André’s big toe.
The grisly relic is owned by Ethel Gove of Northvale, New Jersey. “It’s a small, dried up thing,” she said. “I never touch it, because I’m afraid it will crumble in my hands.” Miss Gove keeps the toe in a bank vault but, in honor of the Bicentennial, she put it on exhibition in the Closter. New Jersey, public library.
In 1820 André’s body was exhumed from the grave at the place of his execution in Tappan, New York, to be sent back to England. David Doremus, an ancestor of Miss Cove’s, served as apprentice to the carpenter hired to build a new coffin for the occasion. Doremus got hold of the piece of bone, built a small wooden reliquary for it, and passed it down to posterity.
BICENTENNIAL CASUALTY
A year ago, while the nation was gearing up for its Bicentennial festivities, the New York State Department of Education quietly abolished the State Office of History. The office, which formerly had a staff of twenty-eight and a budget of $500,000 a year, was eliminated as part of an economy move by the Department of Education. Five jobs were scrapped, and all other History Office personnel were transferred to other units.
The termination of the office seems a rather paradoxical celebration of the nation’s Bicentennial year; most of the money which the Education Department hoped to save was spent by the State Bicentennial Commission. Dr. Louis Tucker, former State Historian and head of the Office of History, commented on the incongruity of cutbacks in both history teaching and in offices such as his own:
“This may be the period in American history when our leaders and those concerned with public policy have the greatest need for a more accurate picture of our history and how our country came into being. I wonder if the Americans who are currently in the White House have read Madison’s note on the Constitution, or the Federalist Papers. Until people come to understand how our system was put together, they will have difficulty in directing our country.…”
WOE TO THE ORANGEMEN—AND TO THECOLOR-BLIND
With St. Patrick’s Day approaching, we should mention a strange, little-known monument to Irish contentiousness in Syracuse, New York. It is a traffic light—perhaps the only one of its kind in America—that has the green lieht on top of the red.
According to John C. McGuire, the unofficial historian of the “Tipperary Hill” area in the western part of the city, the traffic light was first erected in 1925. Dinty Gilmartin, who owned a store nearby, was instantly alarmed and grabbed his telephone: “They got it all mixed up,” he told the local boss, John “Huckle” Ryan. “The red is on top; you better get here before something happens.”
Sure enough, by the time Ryan arrived, the light was smashed. State law said the red had to be on top, and a new light was put up despite Ryan’s protests. It was immediately wrecked, as was the next one. At last the city surrendered, and Tipperary Hill got its upside-down traffic light. It has remained undisturbed ever since.
