What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?
“*Extract from Dr. RUSH’s Oration.”
Robert Wells had sufficient content to fill a four-page supplement (though printed on a smaller sheet) as well as the standard four-page issue when he took the August 5, 1774, edition of the South-Carolina and American General Gazetteto press. With so much space to fill, he devoted the entire final page of the standard issue to a book catalog, listing dozens and dozens of titles in four columns. His inventory represented an array of subjects, though he did not classify or categorize his offerings under headings like other booksellers sometimes did. Instead, he left it to readers to discover the variety as they perused the catalog. Among the many titles, he hawked “THE VISIONS of THOMAS SAY of the City of Philadelphia, which he saw in a Trance.” Wells was either unaware that Say had disavowed that publication in an advertisement in the Pennsylvania Gazette several months earlier or he disregarded it in favor of generating revenue from selling the curious work.
The printer and bookseller also stocked “AN ORATION delivered … before the American Philosophical Society at Philadelphia, containing an Enquiry into the NATURAL HISTORY of MEDICINE among the INDIANS in NORTH-AMERICA … By BENJAMIN RUSH, M.D. Professor of Chemistry in the College of Philadelphia*.” The asterisk directed readers to an “*Extract from Dr. RUSH’s Oration” that filled the bottom third of the column. Despite the title, the excerpt (starting on page 67) warned against “luxury and effeminacy” among colonizers, stating that the damage was not so extensive that it could not be remedied. He offered a series of recommendations, including improved education for children and temperance for adults, while some of them reflected the imperial crisis. Politics and medicine intertwined when Rush commented on “the ravages which Tea is making upon the health and populousness of our country. Had I a double portion of all that eloquence which has been employed in describing the political evils which lately accompanied this East-India herb, it would be too little to set forth the numerous and complicated diseases which it has introduced among us.” The doctor described tea as a hydra, asserting that colonizers needed the strength of Hercules “to vanquish monsters.” Parliament, the East India Company, and colonizers’ own desire for tea were presumably among the many heads of that monstrous hydra. The excerpt concluded with an argument that “America is a theatre where human nature will probably receive her last and principal literary, civil and military honours.”
Wells almost certainly selected passages intended to pique the curiosity of readers and leave them wanting more. They could examine Rush’s entire argument and learn what his comments about education, temperance, and tea had to do with “MEDICINE among the INDIANS” by purchasing the book. Just as modern publishers provide excerpts to entice prospective customers, Wells published an “Extract” to help boost sales.
