Page:A History of the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania.djvu/68

 first pupils in attendance upon the lectures of Dr. Shippen. In 1766 he went to Edinburgh, where, in 1768, he took his degree of Doctor of Medicine; the same year in which the first medical honors were conferred in America. The subject of his thesis was “De coctione ciborum in ventriculo.”

It is stated by Dr. Ramsay, in his eulogium, “that the Writings of Hippocrates were among the first books Benjamin Rush read in Medicine, and, while he was an apprentice, translated his Aphorisms from Greek into English. He also began to keep a note-book of remarkable occurrences, the plan of which he afterwards improved and continued through life. From a part of this record, written in the seventeenth year of his age, we derive the only account of the yellow fever of 1762, which has descended to posterity.” An account of this same epidemic has recently been published by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, from a manuscript of Dr. Redman, found among its Archives.

The desire of Dr. Rush to become the incumbent of the Chair of Chemistry in the Medical School of Philadelphia, was formed while he was still a student at Edinburgh, and in this he was evidently supported by the friendly suggestions of Dr. Morgan. In a letter to this gentleman, dated Jan. 20, 1768, he thus expresses himself: “I exult in the happy prospects, which now open upon you, of the success of the Medical Schools you have established in Philadelphia. The scheme you have published for conferring degrees in Physic has met with the approbation of Dr. Cullen himself, who interests himself warmly in everything that relates to your reputation or success in life; he thinks himself happy, he says, in educating those young men to whom so important a Medical College as that in Philadelphia will owe its foundation and future credit.”

“I thank you for the pains you have taken to secure me the Professorship of Chemistry. I think I am now master of