Medical Thoughts of Shakespeare, by Benjamin Rush Field 61366 [Link: http://www.gutenberg.org/6/1/3/6/61366 ] [Files: 61366-h.htm; 61366-0.txt; ] [Clearance: 20190121073900field] E-text prepared by Paul Marshall, Turgut Dincer, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org) For those who want to know, this book is a detailed study of the medical references in Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare's knowledge of medicine clearly was influenced by the medial theories of his time, most of which were later found to be erroneous. However, his descriptions of illnesses were highly accurate. For example, Mistress Quickly's description of the death of Falstaff (_Henry V_, Act II, Sc. III) is a classic description of hepatic encephalopathy (liver failure). All I could find out about the author is that he was a physician and lived in Pennsylvania. I would guess that he was named after Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, probably the most influential American physician at the time of the Revolution and one of the three physicians who signed the Declaration of Independence. Could the author have been a descendant of Dr. Rush? Thanks, Joe