For the last thirty years, psychiatrists have been familiar with the image of Benjamin Rush, peering at  them from the APA's logo, which first appeared in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1967.  Known as the 'Father of American Psychiatry,'  Rush was, of course, not a psychiatrist, that is, a specialist in treating the mentally ill, as such specialization didnot exist during his lifetime (1746-1813).  Just how he became psychiatry’s father is unclear though probably explained bythe fact that he was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and author of the first and for many years the onlyAmerican treatise on mental illness,  Medical Inquires and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind,  published in 1812 .
      During his lifetime Rush was probably better known for his work on behalf of temperance. He wrote one of the earliest medical works on alcoholism, An Inquiry Into the Effects of Ardent Spirits Upon the body and Mind, published in 1785. This tract represented a radical challenge to previous thinking  that the consumption of alcohol was a positive good. Rush was the first American to call chronic drunkenness a distinct disease.
     Rush also has acquired a reputation  as a psychiatric reformer. This  is largely based on what is known of his work at the Pennsylvania Hospital. This hospital was the first general hospital  in the colonies and the first hospital in the colonies to treat insanity. Initially 'lunaticks' were housed in cold damp cells in the basement of the hospital, a practice rationalized by the common eighteenth century view  that,  since the mad had lost their reason, they were little more than beasts. Evidence exists that Rush did petition the managers of the hospital to provide  more comfortable accommodations in a separate wing of the hospital. While Rush is often given credit for this “reform,” one historian has suggested  that  the requests of wealthy families for more spacious private rooms for their relatives was probably responsible for the implementation of his proposal.
    Those honoring Rush  as psychiatry’s father have struggled most with the fact that his treatment methods seem
barbaric. No mere empiricist, however, Rush derived the rationale for these treatments from his   theory that illness was caused by disordered blood flow. Rush adopted the use of a device known as the  'gyrater,' which spun the patient around on a board to increase the pulse. He was quite proud of his invention of the 'Tranquilizer,' a chair that he boasted “binds and confines every part of the body”  and “acts as a sedative to the tongue and temper as well as to the blood vessels.” In addition,  for recent or violent cases, Rush devised a regimen of bleeding, purging and blistering that quickly reduced the patient to a weakened and therefore more manageable state.
     Founders of the APA, like Isaac Ray, defined their “moral treatment,”  in part by contrast to Rush’s 'heroic
treatment.'  While Rush is usually given the entire credit (or blame, depending on the scholar’s politics) for developments at the Pennsylvania Hospital and his treatment methods, Rush’s work is best seen, as the historian Nancy Tomes has noted, as part of a broader consensus about the proper treatment of the insane that emerged in that period.