Law and Medicine in Revolutionary America

Dissecting the Rush v. Cobbett Trial, 1799

By (author) Linda Myrsiades

Not available to order

Publication date:

18 May 2012

Length of book:

294 pages

Publisher

Lehigh University Press

ISBN-13: 9781611461039

Law and Medicine in Revolutionary America: Dissecting the Rush v. Cobbett Trial, 1799 offers the first deep analysis of the most important libel trial in post-revolutionary America and an approach to understanding a much-studied revolutionary figure, Benjamin Rush, in a new light as a legal subject. This libel trial faced off the new nation’s most prestigious physician-patriot, Benjamin Rush, against its most popular journalist, William Cobbett, the editor of Porcupine’s Gazette. Studied by means of a rare and substantial surviving transcript, the trial features six litigating counsel whose narrative of events and roles provides a unique view of how the revolutionary generation saw itself and the legacy it wished to leave to its progeny. The trial is structured by assaults against medical bleeding and its premier practitioner in yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s in Philadelphia, on the one hand, and castigates the licentiousness of the press in the nation’s then-capital city, on the other. As it does so, it exemplifies the much-derided litigiousness of the new nation and the threat of sedition that characterized the development of political parties and the partisan press in late eighteenth-century America.

Acknowledgments
Illustrations
Prolegomena
The Trial Transcript
Constructing the Plaintiff
The Republican Narrative
Yellow Fever and the Jeremiad Narrative
The Image of Fever
Chapter 1: Benjamin Rush and the Culture of Medicine
Quacks and Factions
The Culture of Medicine
Rush’s Treatments
Doctors’ Wars
Chapter 2: Malpractice Law and Benjamin Rush
Malpractice Law
The Patient’s Duty
Medical Authority
Physicians and the Law
Whitworth and Young
Samuel Thomson
Rush and Malpractice
Rush’s Decision to Prosecute
Chapter 3: William Cobbett and the Scurrilous Press
Cobbett and the Press
Porcupine and Style
Trial by Press Satire
Porcupine’s Prints
Press Feuds
Cobbett’s Attacks on Rush
Sangrado the Bleeder
The Vintner’s Tales
Chapter 4: Libel Law and William Cobbett
Libel Cases
Eleazer Oswald
Sedition Cases
Cobbett and the Law
Changes in Legal Practice
The Venue: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court
Fleeing the Trial
Chapter 5: Sangrado v. the Cloven Foot, the Trial
The Political Story
The Story of Character
The Secular Jeremiad
The Contribution of Sermons
Cobbett’s Self-Defense
Chapter 6: The Trial Concluded
The Judge and the Jury
Cobbett’s Counsel
Trial Strategy
Afterword
Cobbett’s Flight to England
The Death of George Washington
Peter Porcupine v. Paul Polecat
Bibliography

"In Law and Medicine in Revolutionary America, Linda Myrsiades links Americanism with professionalism and converts medical and legal history into a narrative of the nation. Marshalling a fascinating array of primary sources that includes trial records, press coverage, and personal correspondence, Myrsiades meticulously dissects the 1799 libel trial of Rush v Cobbett. By showing how its legal anatomy embodied the most pressing political and ethical questions of the emerging nation, Myrsiades makes a significant contribution to the study of medicine, law, and the humanities that will appeal to readers across a broad range of disciplines."—