Of Hydroxychloroquine and Bloodletting

Yellow fever, race, and the politics of medicine

Image by Vincent LaBarca

If Dr. Fauci is our patron saint of infectious diseases, then Benjamin Rush was the Fauci of 18th-century America. Born in Philadelphia on Christmas Eve, 1745, Dr. Rush was a true Renaissance Man. Physician, patriot, author, abolitionist, philosopher, father of American psychiatry, and signer of the Declaration of…