Much of what we know about Franklin’s early life comes from the first part of his Autobiography. His father, Josiah, was an English religious “dissenter,” who sailed for Boston with his wife, Anne, and three children in 1682. Strong and hard working, Josiah supported his family by making candles and soap in what was then a small city of 6,000 inhabitants. After Anne died bearing her seventh child in 1689, Josiah married Abiah Folger, and Benjamin was the eighth of their ten children. He was born on January 6, 1705, according to the Julian calendar. (When Parliament mandated a switch...

Despite his emphasis on staying healthy in addition to becoming wealthy and wise, Poor Richard says almost nothing about the importance of exercise. Yet Franklin, like other well-read people in the eighteenth century, knew that some exercise should be a part of any regimen for maintaining good health. In fact, although Franklin is usually portrayed as an overweight man reading or writing behind a desk, he was an expert swimmer, lifted weights, and tried to make exercising a part of his daily routine.

Franklin exercised from youth into old age, often setting a striking example for others to follow. Unsurprisingly,...

In 1772, Benjamin Franklin responded to some flattering words from his sister Jane Mecom about his young grandson, Benny Bache, who was then just three. While writing back about this “uncommonly fine boy,” his thoughts shifted to his son Franky, “now dead 36 years, whom I have seldom since seen equal’d in every thing, and whom to this Day I cannot think of without a Sigh.”¹

Francis Folger Franklin passed away in 1736, when he was four years old, and his death broke the hearts of his parents. He had been their only child after six years of marriage, and...

On February 10, 1752, American cultural and medical history was made in Philadelphia. That day, two patients, Margaret Sherlock and Hannah Shines, were admitted to the temporary building that would be used until construction could be completed on a recently approved new building for the city’s Pennsylvania Hospital. This institution would be the first major civilian hospital in the colonies for needy men and women. It would become a haven for physically sick or injured patients, Margaret Sherlock being the first such patient, and for the mentally ill, of which Hannah Shines was the first.

Benjamin Franklin did not come...

We have seen that Franklin was a collector, disseminator, and printer of medical information, and a publicist willing to involve himself in worthy causes. He was concerned with preventative medicine and dealing with infectious diseases at the individual level, with discussing medical ethics and discussing new information in small groups, such as his Junto and American Philosophical Society, and with building physical institutions to serve public health needs, as exemplified by the landmark Pennsylvania Hospital.

From what has been covered so far, it would be easy to develop the misconception that Franklin was not personally involved with treating patients or...

Franklin recognized that a medical treatment that may not work with the common paralytic disorder might still be beneficial with other disorders. This chapter examines Franklin’s use of medical electricity with hysteria and melancholia, two conditions that were viewed very differently in the eighteenth century than they are today.

Hysteria has been associated with different ideas at different points in time.¹ Today it is called a conversion disorder, because it involves motor and/or sensory system problems that do not appear to have a physical basis, and therefore are attributed to the mind.

Although modern practitioners approach hysteria as a psychological...

Benjamin Franklin made two extended diplomatic trips to England prior to the American War for Independence. Both occurred because he was active in the Pennsylvania Assembly, which represented the citizens of the colony. In the first mission, from 1757 to 1762, his main goal was to try to convince the two surviving sons of William Penn, Thomas and Richard, to pay taxes on their vast Pennsylvania lands for the security and welfare of their colony. There were other issues as well, such as having to work with an inflexible governor—a man appointed, instructed, and salaried by the Penns.

Faced...

When time permitted, Franklin left London for two reasons. One, as we have seen, was to get the exercise associated with traveling, which he believed was beneficial to body and mind. The other was to meet and exchange ideas with some of the most learned men of the Enlightenment outside London.

He visited the Birmingham region in the English Midlands several times to meet with Erasmus Darwin, a graduate of the Edinburgh Medical School and one of the most distinguished natural philosophers and medical scholars of the century. He also traveled south from London on several occasions to visit Jonathan...

Benjamin Franklin enjoyed reasonably good health for a heavyset male living in the eighteenth century, at least until fairly late in life. Yet, like everyone else, he did catch colds, flus, and other illnesses. During the fall of 1757, soon after he arrived in London, he was plagued by a disorder for several months, and it was not until late in November that he was finally able to inform Debby “that my intermitting fever which had continued to harass me, by frequent relapses,” finally seemed over. “My doctor, Fothergill, who had forbid me the use of pen and ink, now...

Franklin’s theory of colds emphasized the transmission of foul matter to susceptible, unregimented bodies. In his estimation, minute particles, most likely of animal matter, bore the responsibility for colds, flus, and related diseases. One ramification of his theory was that he became even more upset at the thought of being forced to breathe the miserable, polluted air of the big cities.¹ In this context, he campaigned even harder for better sanitation. He was also taken back by how people closed themselves up in poorly ventilated homes, shops, offices, and hospitals. This led him to think about ways to purify the...

During his stay in England, Franklin received a letter from Cadwalader Evans, the physician he had worked with in 1752 to treat C.B.’s hysteria with electricity (see Chapter 6). He had recently written to Evans to ask what books were now on the shelves of the library at Pennsylvania Hospital, in order to know what titles might still be needed. Along with his inquiry, which he had sent in 1767, Franklin had enclosed a treatise on lead poisoning as the cause of a serious epidemic in Devonshire, England, one associated with a painful colic.

The author of the treatise was...

In 1780, while in France, Franklin received a letter from Dr. James Potter in New Fairfield, Connecticut. A year earlier, Potter had been elected president of “the first Medical Society in the thirteen United States of America Since their Independence.” The American physician’s main objective was to begin a “literary Correspondence” between his new society and the “Royal Medical Society in France, of which we have the pleasure to find that Doctr Franklin is a member.”¹ Potter spelled out his aspiration to “His Excellency Benjamin Franklin . . . Plenipotentiary at the Court of France,” and he politely asked him...

The major episode of medical significance during Franklin’s tenure in France, and indeed one of the most important in terms of psychology, psychiatry, and medicine, involved mesmerism, the best remembered healing fad of the century. The movement’s leader, the flamboyant Franz Anton Mesmer, claimed he was endowed with special powers that could make sick people better. But many natural philosophers, including Franklin, doubted his ability to manipulate invisible cosmic forces.

Franz Anton Mesmer was born in 1734 in Iznang, a town in the south of Germany near Lake Constance.¹ He first studied theology and philosophy at the Jesuit University of...

On July 13, 1762, just prior to departing England, Franklin penned a letter to Father Giambatista Beccaria, a professor of natural philosophy and the most ardent supporter of his electrical science in Italy.¹ Beccaria had sent a new treatise on electricity to Franklin, and Franklin used the occasion to tell him about his latest invention, the glass armonica. It was his gift to people who loved music, and he expected it to revolutionize the playing of musical glasses.

What neither man knew at the time was that Franklin’s glass instrument would be associated with medicine in two very different ways....

The previous set of chapters on Franklin’s medical forays in France made brief mention of two of his health problems. One was his painful gout, which was flaring up with increased frequency and intensity. When it attacked, it was difficult for him to walk or stand for extended periods of time. He even turned to his gout as an excuse to avoid having to meet any more with Jean-Paul Marat. The other problem was his bladder stone, which was growing enormous by the time he was asked to evaluate Mesmer’s claims. His stone was even more of an impediment than...

On January 29, 1777, Jan Ingenhousz wrote a letter from his desk in Vienna to Franklin in Passy. “My journey to Ratisborn is fixed upon the 10 or 12 of April, if nothing hinders me, where I will inoculate the two sons of the Reigning Prince of Tour [Thurn] and Taxis, after which I should be very glad to take a trip to Paris and to have the great satisfaction of seeing you,” he told his old friend.¹ Paris was not the final destination for the Austrian royal physician; it was a stop en route to London. Ingenhousz had been...

Gout is a metabolic disorder characterized by sodium urate deposits in the joints. Typically, the joints of the extremities are most affected, and the great toe is usually the worst off of all. The result is a succession of localized pains with swelling and redness, which can make walking difficult and, in severe cases, almost impossible. Benjamin Franklin, like so many people in the eighteenth century, knew the clinical manifestations of gout firsthand.

Gout received considerable attention in classical antiquity.¹ The Hippocratic physicians believed that it resulted from a humoral condition, usually too much bile or an overabundance of thickened...

In 1785, when Franklin finally received the permission he had long sought to return home, his movements were severely restricted, not just by his gout but because of a large kidney stone. He was no longer able to walk even moderate distances, he could not ride a horse, and he could not even handle the bumping of a carriage ride to Paris without being subjected to intense pain. So how was he going to make his way from Passy to the coast, where the ocean-going ships were docked?

Franklin first thought that he might be able to float down the...

One of the most notable observations about Franklin in his senior years is just how sharp his intellect remained, as exemplified by the prosthetic devices and aids that he developed and his letters, including the highly informative epistle he sent to Benjamin Vaughan in 1786 on lead poisoning (see Chapter 11). His remarkable mental agility can also be gleaned from the numerous activities he turned to with the curiosity and enthusiasm of a much younger man. Even during his final transatlantic crossing, which he doubted he would ever be able to make, he immersed himself in natural philosophy. On some...