biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1745–1813)
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| biography:
| Physician, Revolutionary patriot, and educator, born in Byberry, Pennsylvania, USA. After studying medicine in Philadelphia, he completed his studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland (1768). He set up his practice in Philadelphia., taught chemistry at the medical college there, and published the first American chemistry text (1770). He also wrote on social and political subjects, and, as the American Revolution approached, he attached himself to the patriots. As a member of the Continental Congress, he signed the Declaration of Independence (1776). During the war, he served only a year as surgeon-general of the middle department of the Continental army because he had a dispute with his superior (and former professor), Dr William Shippen, and he was loosely linked to the Conway Cabal, accused of plotting to replace George Washington. He returned to his Philadelphia practice but helped lead the fight for Pennsylvania to adopt the new US Constitution, and later served as the treasurer of the US Mint (1797–1813). Meanwhile, he served on the staff of the Philadelphia Hospital (1783–1813), also taught at the University of Pennsylvania (1792–1813), and established the first free clinic in the USA (1786). He helped found the first anti-slavery society in the USA (1803), and was outspoken on other social issues, calling for an end to capital punishment, the reform of education and prisons, and the promotion of temperance. He was also forward-looking in his attitudes toward the treatment of mental illness, and his Diseases of the Mind (1812) presaged some of the ideas of modern mental therapeutics. His ideas on the cause of diseases, however, became so exotic as to be dangerous, believing, for example, that all diseases were caused by the ‘excitability’ of blood vessels and could be cured by bloodletting. He published Medical Inquiries and Observations (1789–93) to promote this theory, and when Philadelphia suffered an epidemic of yellow fever in 1793, he put his theory into practice, but his patients continued to die. This did not stop him from publishing his theories again in An Account of the Bilious Remitting Yellow Fever.... (1794), in which he actually came closer to the truth when he indicated that unsanitary conditions had also played a role in the epidemic. |
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