Biographer and Penn faculty member Stephen Fried will discuss new access to Rush’s writings, the nascent Rush Papers Project by Penn Libraries and the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Penn Libraries’ evolving Benjamin Rush Portal. Fried will describe how the Portal has blossomed thanks to the work of Yen Ho, a library science intern at the Penn Libraries Biomedical Library working under his guidance. Hear about the abundance of Rush papers, lecture notes, and journals that are now united and easily accessible, ranging from Rush’s medical training and teachings to his writings about the 1793 Yellow Fever pandemic to race and abolition. The Portal pulls together resources from numerous institutions, including Penn Libraries and the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Many of the materials presented on the Benjamin Rush portal were digitized as part of a multi-institution project organized by the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries, “For the Health of the New Nation: Philadelphia as the Center of American Medical Education, 1746-1868.” This project was generously funded by a grant from the Digitizing Hidden Collections initiative of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The Hidden Collections initiative in turn is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

This event was co-sponsored by Penn Libraries and was recorded on September 8, 2020.