372 MEDICAL INSTITUTIONS OF AMERICA CHAP. 



among the poor the sum of $5000 awarded to him as 

 damages for calumnious attacks upon his character in 

 " Peter Porcupine's Gazette." He once quoted Boer- 

 haave's famous saying that he liked his poor patients the 

 best because God was the paymaster. 



Rush taught medicine to a long succession of pupils 

 for forty-four years, and for thirty of these he was physi- 

 cian to the Pennsylvania Hospital ; never missing, so 

 it is told of him, a punctual visit on each succeeding 

 day. Fothergill was one of his exemplars ; no man, he 

 said, ever discharged the duties of his profession with 

 more fidelity and dignity than he ; nor could he wish 

 anything better for himself than to be the imitator of 

 Fothergill. We have a glimpse of him in later years in 

 some letters to Lettsom ; a man of frank and wholesome 

 temper, modest and kindly, looking back upon a life of 

 many blessings and enjoyments, and keeping to the end 

 his " capacity of studying with equal pleasure and profit." 

 He died in 1813, at sixty-eight years of age. One of his 

 sons, Richard Rush, was a well-known statesman, and 

 Minister in 1818 to England ; the Rush-Bagot Agreement 

 of 1817, which settled the peace of the American-Canadian 

 frontier, and is still in force, perpetuates his name. 1 



To return to the college at Philadelphia. We have 

 seen that this was by 1769 well organised under able and 

 vigorous young men ; for Morgan was thirty-four years of 

 age, Shippen thirty-three, Adam Kuhn, who took Materia 

 Medica and Botany, twenty-eight, and Rush but twenty- 

 four ; Bond alone was over fifty years. They had worked 

 hard to obtain the best training in Europe, and they looked 

 up to Edinburgh as their academical parent, as Edinburgh 

 had looked up to Leyden in the great days of Boerhaave^ 

 The first medical degrees were conferred in the year 1768. 

 King's College, New York, followed hard on the steps of 



1 Dr. Rush's works were published in 7 vols. : they include excellent 

 Directions for preserving the Health of Soldiers. 



2 " Vos Professores medici . . . qui magno nummi, temporis et laboris 

 sumptu, longa quoque peregrinatione per varias regiones, et populos, domum 

 reduxistis peritiam, etc." (Oration of Provost at Commencement, June 21, 1768 ; 

 Carson, Hist. Med. Department Univ. Penna. p. 69). 



