# Benjamin Rush treats Philadelphia yellow fever with aggressive depletion in 1793 Date: 1793 ## The fact In September 1793, during Philadelphia’s yellow-fever epidemic, Benjamin Rush and allied physicians treated patients with repeated bloodletting and mercurial purges, which Rush justified as restoration of Hippocratic method against milder rivals. The epidemic was mosquito-[borne](/people/elisabeth-borne), a mechanism no one then proved. ## Context Rush was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the city’s most famous physician. He framed opposition as a betrayal of ancient method. Later historians, including work presented by NLM, treat the bleedings as harmful relative to supportive care. Hippocratic Epidemics actually contains case observation that could have supported caution; Rush cited the tradition as a licence to act. [Hippocrates](/people/hippocrates) of Cos is not the sole author of every Greek medical treatise later copied under his name, and he is not the signer of every later oath or code that quoted him. Shared work with unnamed Coan practitioners, Alexandrian compilers, Galen, Latin printers, medical faculties, and twentieth-century medical associations does not erase the Cos identity Plato used, and it does not make a fifth-century physician the author of the 1948 Declaration of Geneva. ## Evidence and sources Founders Online publishes Rush’s own letters. NLM’s Fever exhibition independently narrates the 1793 outbreak and medical conflict. Neither source is Wikipedia. Official or archival record: Founders Online — Rush correspondence on the 1793 fever (https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Rush/01-02-02-0175; U.S. National Archives / Founders Online). ## Significance Worsening infectious-disease path via humoral depletion. Medium confidence on individual harm, high on the occurrence of the campaign. A tradition can be cited to do the opposite of careful prognosis. A printed corpus does not vaccinate a child. An oath does not staff a clinic. ## What is established and what is not Established: Rush ran an aggressive depletion campaign in September 1793 and cited ancient method. Not established: a precise death count caused uniquely by bleeding rather than by yellow fever itself. What would change the picture: a contradictory autograph, a securely dated Coan inscription naming a different author, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions acting in his name. The documentary trail can name an office, printer, code, trial, or treatise heading; it cannot name a complete Coan patient register. Confidence belongs on the impact path. Estimates of later harm from humoral treatment, where historians publish them, are attributed to those historians, not invented here. A Cos vita, a medieval oath manuscript, a Venetian folio, and a twentieth-century medical-association code are different instruments even when they share a heading. Hippocrates’ contribution, where it exists, is the name and the later use of treatises grouped under that name, not a modern ministry signature. Sharing labour with printers, editors, prosecutors, or assemblies is not a reason to drop the row and not a reason to treat the row as a clinical trial. Readers who want a birth certificate, a patient register, or a unique coefficient onto a modern indicator will not find those things in this instrument, and the page should not pretend otherwise. The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit to Cos in the fifth century BCE. If a number of deaths, doses, or pupils is not in the official or independent record named above, it is not supplied here. ## People - Hippocrates: https://factrail.ai/people/hippocrates ## Drivers - Infectious-Disease Transmission: https://factrail.ai/drivers/infectious-disease-transmission ## Sources - https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/fever/ - https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Rush/01-02-02-0175 ## Methodology https://factrail.ai/methodology Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/us-rush-yellow-fever-bloodletting-1793