Early Republic Evangelicals, Abortion, and the Culture Wars

In 1823, Hugh Lenox Hodge became a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania's medical school. Hodge hailed from a well-known Philadelphia family. His father, also Hugh, served as a physician in Early Republic Pennsylvania. The elder Hodge's sons made their family even more established by the middle of the Nineteenth Century. Hugh Lenox Hodge graduated from Princeton and became a well-known physician and medical professor; his next youngest brother Charles became a world-renowned theologian and head of Princeton Seminary. Hugh Lenox Hodge also earned ordination in the Presbyterian Church. Hugh Lenox Hodge served on the medical faculty at the University of Pennsylvania for forty years. His theological and social commitments were evangelical and like most evangelicals of his era social causes remained important to him in his professional and religious capacities. Like most evangelicals of the era, he loathed abortion and denounced any attempt to make the procedure legal or more accessible.