Summary: <p>In 1793, the dreaded Yellow Fever swept through Philadelphia. The deadly virus raced through the nation’s capital between August and November, killing at least 5,000 of the city’s inhabitants.</p> <p>Among the multi-racial group of Americans on the front lines of the battle against the disease was Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a key figure in the nation’s early medical establishment.</p> <p>Rush, who was the architect of the reunion between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams after years of bitter silence between the two men, was a Founding Father in his own right, but one often overshadowed by his contemporaries.</p> <p>On today’s episode, historian and journalist Stephen Fried joins Jim Ambuske for a wide-ranging conversation about Rush, founding legacies, and of course public health and medicine in the eighteenth century.</p> <p>Fried is the author of the recent book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Rush-Revolution-Benjamin-Visionary-Founding/dp/0804140065"><em>Rush: Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father</em></a>.</p> <p><strong>About Our Guest:</strong></p> <p>Stephen Fried is an award-winning journalist and <em>New York Times</em> best-selling author who teaches at Columbia University and at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of seven acclaimed nonfiction books, including <em>Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wil</em><a href="http://www.stephenfried.com/wp/books#fred"><em>d </em></a><em>West—One Meal at a Time</em> (a <em>New York Times</em> bestseller that was the subject of a PBS documentary); <em>Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia</em> (which inspired the Emmy-winning HBO film <em>Gia</em> starring Angelina Jolie); <em>Bitter Pills: Inside the Hazardous World of Legal Drugs </em>(which triggered an FDA inquiry into CNS adverse reactions to antibiotics); <em>The New Rabbi</em><a href="http://www.stephenfried.com/wp/books#rabbi"> </a>(a behind-the-scenes look at one of the nation’s most powerful houses of worship struggling to choose a new spiritual leader) and a collection of his magazine columns on being a spouse, <em>Husbandry</em>. He is also co-author, with Patrick Kennedy, of the 2015 <em>New York Times</em> bestseller <em>A Common Struggle: A Personal Journey through the Past and Future of Mental Illness and Addiction</em>.</p> <p><strong>About Our Host:</strong></p> <p>Jim Ambuske, Ph.D. leads the <a href="https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/">Center for Digital History</a> at the Washington Library. A historian of the American Revolution, Scotland, and the British Atlantic World, Ambuske graduated from the University of Virginia in 2016. He is a former Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia Law Library. At UVA Law, Ambuske co-directed the<a href="http://archives.law.virginia.edu/catalogue/"> 1828 Catalogue Project</a> and the <a href="http://scos.law.virginia.edu/">Scottish Court of Session Project</a>. He is currently at work on a book about emigration from Scotland in the era of the American Revolution as well as a chapter on Scottish loyalism during the American Revolution for a volume to be published by the University of Edinburgh Press.</p>
