Adam Kuhn (78)

Election date: 1768 (Elected to the revived American Philosophical Society. Elected to the American Society in 1768.)
APS Office(s): Curator of the APS (1769-1770, 1771-1772)

Adam Kuhn (17 November 1741–3 July 1817) was a physician and botanist, and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1768. Born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, he attended the Academy of Philadelphia and studied medicine with his father before voyaging to Sweden in 1761. There, he studied botany at the University of Upsala under Carolus Linnaeus, who named an American plant genus after him. Kuhn also studied in London and Scotland, earning an M.D. degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1767. He returned to Pennsylvania in 1768 and became professor of botany and materia medica at the College of Philadelphia. He also served as physician to the Pennsylvania Hospital and Philadelphia Dispensary and volunteered his services with the Society for Inoculating the Poor. Patients of his private practice included APS member Henry Drinker and the family of George Washington. During the American Revolution, he evaluated military surgery candidates and served as director-general of a hospital for Pennsylvania troops. He refused to take the Test Oath, however, and so was placed under house arrest by the revolutionary government as British forces advanced on Philadelphia. Following the British evacuation, Kuhn departed for the West Indies. Suspicions about his loyalties delayed his return, but in 1789 he resettled and was named professor of medicine at the University of the State of Pennsylvania. When the University united with the College of Philadelphia in 1792 he became professor of physic, and in 1808 he was named president of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, an institution he helped found. His few publications included a periodical piece on the 1793 yellow fever epidemic; the piece drew harsh criticism from APS member Benjamin Rush, who advocated a vastly different course of treatment. Kuhn’s son Hartman Kuhn was an APS member. (PI, DAB)

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