7. Dr. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphian physician and signatory to the Declaration of Independence, believed that being black was a disease and that bloodletting could cure yellow fever.
A leading figure of the American Enlightenment, Dr. Benjamin Rush enthusiastically supported the revolutionary cause and served as Surgeon General of the Continental Army. Despite many laudatory contributions to his discipline, Rush was a notorious proponent of “heroic medicine”: the belief in bloodletting and other bodily purges to cure illness. Of particular note, during the Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793, Rush, as one of the leading physicians of the city, treated as many as one hundred patients per day. However, due to his archaic and unscientific methods, few of these unfortunates survived his methods and instead died.
Although successful in defending his reputation in a libel action against William Cobbett, who had accused him of killing more patients than he had saved, Rush’s methods were ultimately blamed for the deaths of both Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. Furthermore, Rush believed that Africans could not contract yellow fever, without evidence supporting this claim, and as such merely intensified the epidemic by declining to treat certain population centers. This apathy might also have stemmed from racialist views of medicine, including that “blackness” was a medical disorder that could, like any “disease”, be cured.