An extremely gifted craftsman and self-taught artist, William Rush flourished first as a ship-figurehead carver and then as a sculptor. In this work, he portrayed the prominent Dr. Physick, famous for his good work during Philadelphia’s 1793 yellow-fever epidemic, and then as the first chair of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania. His reputation as the father of American surgery parallels Rush’s as the first American-born sculptor. The success of Rush’s work in the round ignited a market for portrait busts that thrived well into the late nineteenth century.