October 5, 2006 4:56PM # Extremism in Defense of Liberty By [Gene Healy](https://www.cato.org/people/gene-healy) --- SHARE Michael Cannon, Mike Tanner, and other libertarian health care gurus may appreciate this. I recently came across an intriguing quote by Founding Father Benjamin Rush, surgeon general of the Continental Army and signer of the Declaration of Independence. So I did what everyone does these days and went to [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Rush). There I learned that: > Rush believed that Americans should enshrine the right to medical freedom in their Constitution, much as the right to freedom of religion is expressly guaranteed in that document. > > > Rush is reported to have argued that “Unless we put Medical Freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship … [to restrict the art of healing to one class of men, and deny equal privilege to others](https://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=1105), will be to constitute the Bastille of Medical Science. All such laws are un-American and despotic and have no place in a Republic … The Constitution of this Republic should make special privilege for Medical Freedom as well as Religious Freedom.” (Of course, if you read a little further, you learn that some of his medical theories were not so hot). Rush was also a rabid antimilitarist who proposed in 1792 that two captions be painted “over the portals of the Department of War”: “An office for butchering the human species” and “A Widow and Orphan making office”–though that’s an idea that would probably be even less popular today. ##### Related Tags [General](https://www.cato.org/general), [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics), [Health Care](https://www.cato.org/health-care), [Constitutional Law](https://www.cato.org/constitutional-law), [Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies](https://www.cato.org/robert-levy-center-constitutional-studies) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).