Citation: Julia Dauer, “First-Person Salamanders: Benjamin Rush, Impersonality, and Nonhuman Beings,” Early American Literature, Vol. 54, No. 3, 2019, p. 773-808.
Image citation: Salamanders from the Comte de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle via Wikimedia Commons and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
In 1812, Benjamin Rush wrote about a patient who explained his arson attempts with a simple claim: “I am a salamander.” This essay mobilizes the salamander patient’s claim to argue that Rush’s Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind is structured by impersonal forms of first-person prose. Rush often accepts first-person claims, even those that seem to be about identity, with no corresponding assumptions about interiority. This practice makes rhetorical participation available to a surprisingly wide range of testifiers. As I show, both Rush’s attitude toward first-person reporting and the salamander patient’s claim bear close relationships to eighteenth-century natural history. Linking the salamander example to letters Rush received from his patients on the one hand and a case he cites involving enslaved African dirt eaters on the other, this essay examines when and how the parameters of human personhood are reconfigured by claims to be nonhuman.