Deception and Terror as Cures For Madness

Benjamin Rush (1746–1813) signed the Declaration of Independence, was Physician General of the Continental Army, and served as Professor of Physic and Dean of the Medical School at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the undisputed father of American psychiatry: his portrait adorns the official seal of the American Psychiatric Association. With Pinel, Rush pioneered in the medical conceptualization of madness, that is, he claimed that madness was a disease whose control was a medical responsibility. And like Pinel, Rush advocated the “moral treatment” of insanity, that is, he believed that the principal method of treatment used by the alienist ought to be coercion of the patient, by means of both force and fraud. The selections here reprinted, from Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind , * illustrate Rush’s approach to the insane.