"Rush: Revolution, Madness & the Visionary Doctor and Founding Father"

Award-winning author and journalist Stephen Fried literally wrote the book on Dr. Benjamin Rush. By the time he was thirty, Dr. Benjamin Rush had signed the Declaration of Independence, edited Common Sense, toured Europe as Benjamin Franklin’s protégé, and become John Adams’s confidant, and was soon to be appointed Washington’s surgeon general.

As the new republic coalesced, he became a visionary writer and reformer; a medical pioneer whose insights and reforms revolutionized the treatment of mental illness; an opponent of slavery and prejudice by race, religion, or gender; an adviser to, and often the physician of, America’s first leaders; and “the American Hippocrates.” Fried’s Rush reveals his singular life and towering legacy, installing him in the pantheon of our wisest and boldest Founding Fathers.

Stephen Fried is an American investigative journalist, non-fiction author, essayist and adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Pennsylvania. A longtime writer and editor at Philadelphia magazine, is also an award-winning writer, a two-time recipient of the National Magazine Award, and has written for GQ, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Parade, Ladies’ Home Journal.