American Eden

by Victoria Johnson

  Hosack was so fascinated by what Curtis was teaching him that he started going to the Brompton garden every day. Although medical botany had first led him there, he was now discovering what a small county medicine occupied in the sprawling botanical kingdom. Curtis had dedicated another of his many beds, for example, to agricultural crops such as oats, barley, and flax. He argued that sound farming practices were every bit as vital to a great nation as military prowess and cultural achievements. A farmer should be on intimate terms with “his vegetable foes as well as his vegetable friends.” Curtis so deplored the way British landowners ruined their soil with poor planting habits that he wrote an entire book on how to use various kinds of grasses—“a much neglected tribe,” he called them—to restore exhausted soil. To illustrate his point Curtis sowed a small meadow’s worth of grasses, rushes, and sedges at Brompton. (He immediately found himself at war with “one or more hares” that ate his Juncus niveus to the ground, despite his past experience that British hares “preferred the Poa procumbens.”) He also planted floating foxtail grass (Alopecurus geniculatus) and sweet vernal grass (Anthoxanthum odoratum), the last of which he adored for its “agreeable scent of new made hay.” In summertime, any Brompton visitor who dared to break the garden rules and stray from the central path could wade nearly knee-deep through a tiny parcel of the famously picturesque English countryside.

  Yet in the very loveliness of the English countryside, Curtis explained, lethal poisons lurked. A child reached for handfuls of shiny black berries and expired in convulsions hours later. A poor farmer collected wild greens to boil for food and then watched members of his family die after the meal. Curtis took care to include poisonous plants in his garden beds and also showed in the Flora Londinensis and the Botanical Magazine how to recognize them. At Brompton, for example, he was growing a poisonous herb called Aethusa cynapium, whose leaves looked so much like common parsley that it was known as fool’s parsley. It caused vomiting, delirium, convulsions, and death. Nearby, Curtis had planted a pretty plant of lavender and pale green sometimes called sea bluebells (Pulmonaria maritima). One would hardly suspect, he wrote, that “poison lies under such an elegant form.”

  As Hosack circumnavigated the Brompton garden that summer, he learned that each bed had been as thoughtfully stocked as the cabinets in a natural history museum. Yet Curtis was too inspired a gardener not to fringe his Enlightenment rigor with decorative hues and scents. He had edged his long central path with a flower border and then bisected it with a bower stretching from one side of the garden to the other. At the end of a long winter, he always took heart at the “brilliant and exhilarating” colors of his spring crocuses (Crocus vernus), although he lamented that the sparrows loved the crocuses as much as he did. He recommended placing “the skin of a cat properly stuffed” nearby to scare the sparrows away.

  Between the Brompton flower beds, Curtis had planted rows of Lombardy poplars, which he was pruning to create screens of foliage that would give visitors the sensation of moving from room to room in a house whose ceiling was the sky. For Hosack, the garden did become a new home. What he couldn’t find in the soil, he found in books, spending hours in the little library in the back corner of the garden. Curtis had installed an aviary just next door, and with the birds singing and the leaves rustling on the shrubbery outside, a reader curled up in a library chair felt, as one visitor put it, “a thousand miles from London.” Among the books Hosack could pull from the shelves were dozens of works by Linnaeus and other botanists and horticulturists, including Curtis himself—his Flora Londinensis, his Botanical Magazine, his book on agricultural grasses, and his handy guide to Linnaeus’s sexual system. Curtis had also stockpiled such volumes as Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property, Directions for Bringing Seeds and Plants from Abroad, and The Theology of Insects, or Demonstration of the Perfections of God in All That Concerns Insects. Early on, Curtis had allowed visitors to check out the library books and take them home, but after “much inconvenience” he had suspended the practice.

  Hosack wrote to his father for additional funds and began to visit the London booksellers for himself. He purchased a five-volume edition of Linnaeus’s masterpiece, Systema Naturae. Setting aside the first two volumes, which covered the animal kingdom, he opened the volume on plants to its title page and in his finest possible handwriting laid claim to the whole botanical world. “E. Libris David Hosack, Lond. 1793.” He was ravenous for knowledge. He collected William Speechly’s Treatise on the Culture of the Vine, James Bolton’s History of Funguses Growing about Halifax, Lord Kames’s The Gentleman Farmer, and a gilt-trimmed English translation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Letters on the Elements of Botany Addressed to a Lady. Rousseau offered comforting words for a botanical novice: “Do not however be terrified at the undertaking. . . . Nothing is required but to have patience to begin with the beginning.” In truth, Hosack seemed to possess infinite patience for his new obsession. Bending over the Brompton beds, he labored for hours to connect the dense columns of Latin names printed in Systema Naturae with the way each plant looked as it grew.

  Walking from one end of the garden to the other was like caravanning across whole empires, but instead of consulting a map Hosack tracked his progress around the globe with treatises on the plants of Japan, Ceylon, Peru, Chile, and other faraway lands. Curtis loved his homegrown British plants and chafed at criticism that he gave them too much space in the Botanical Magazine, yet at Brompton he lavished attention on hundreds of foreign specimens. It was in Brompton’s greenhouse and hothouse that Hosack encountered the rarest of these treasures. In the greenhouse, for example, Curtis was raising a dark flower from Spain called melancholy toad-flax (Antirrhinum triste) and a woolly cineraria (Cineraria lanata), probably from the Canary Islands, with pinkish-purple blooms. His prize specimen in the stove-heated hothouse was a plant that “every person who can boast a hothouse will be anxious to possess”: the scarlet fuchsia (Fuchsia coccinea), a Brazilian flower whose allure sent him into a fit of poesy. Writing in the Botanical Magazine in 1790, Curtis said its central petals looked like “a small roll of the richest purple-coloured ribband.”

  The Brompton Botanic Garden was an enormous horticultural and botanical achievement, and Curtis’s fame was spreading across Europe. Nevertheless, he had failed to achieve his greatest ambition: compiling a complete natural history of the British Isles. To his friends he sometimes seemed depressed—“sunk in spirits” and “indolent.” Once a week that summer, however, the clouds cleared from Curtis’s brow and he became sunny again. He had decided to offer a weekly course of “herbarizing excursions” aimed at medical students, practicing physicians, and country squires—the last of whom he joked might “pursue the foxtail-grass with more advantage than the fox.” Curtis was close to fifty now, but he still got as excited about collecting in the wild as he had when he was a boy.

  Hosack signed up for the summer session of 1793, along with five other men. Their excursions began in the midmorning, often at the edge of Hampstead Heath at a sixteenth-century tavern called the Spaniards Inn.† Each student was instructed to arrive with a small notebook and be prepared for hours of botanizing; latecomers would be left behind as they marched off into the fields together like a tiny regiment. There was one other American in the class, a doctor from New York with whom Hosack would be able to trade gossip about life back home. He would also have plenty to discuss with a young Englishman named Robert Thornton, who had recently earned his medical degree from Cambridge with a thesis on oxygen, body heat, and blood. Thornton was rather handsome, but he tended to sweat profusely because his research had convinced him that the best way to stay cool in the scalding heat was to race about in a heavy woolen vest. Within a few years of the Brompton summer, Thornton would be launching the most ambitious botanical publication project Britain had ever seen, an expensive illustrated series that nearly ruined him. It was called the New Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnaeus, although he soon published a chunk of it und
er a snappier title: The Temple of Flora, or Garden of Nature.

  There were several other British men in the class, but the most illustrious was the Right Honourable Charles Francis Greville. The second son of the Earl of Warwick, he had spent his childhood roaming the halls of Warwick Castle, his family’s ancestral home. He was Member of Parliament for Warwick and an accomplished mineralogist who had been a Fellow of the Royal Society for nearly two decades.

  As Hosack and his new classmates walked through the countryside, Curtis imparted to them his life’s greatest pleasure—the power “to read in that book which to the generality of mankind is a mere blank.” Curtis searched for plants in bloom so he could show the students the critical structures of growth and reproduction. His face lit up when he found an interesting species. He carefully plucked each specimen and placed it between two pages of his notebook, directing the students to do the same with specimens of their own. Then he charged onward in search of the next prize.

  Gentlemen botanizing, from the frontispiece to Curtis’s Flora Londinensis

  Hosack discovered that meeting plants in the wild this way, where they never sprouted helpful Latin labels, was testing and deepening his store of botanical knowledge. Although Curtis fumed that a “rage for building” at the edges of London was wiping out many species he used to see there, Hosack now began to recognize the conditions of soil and sunshine that particular English plants sought out when left to their own devices. Sneezewort, the toothache remedy that Curtis was raising at Brompton, flourished alongside the ditches in the Battersea meadows, while the sweet-scented vernal grass that Curtis so loved grew in dense meadows in the bottomlands. The bright blooms of the scarlet pimpernel (Anagallis arvensis) sprinkled themselves across the cornfields, a contrasting effect Curtis admired.

  After several hours of walking and collecting, Curtis would lead his tired band back to the tavern. He personally found long meals a waste of good plant-hunting time and ate only to fuel his hikes, but he allowed his students to refresh themselves before he rounded them up for the second part of the day’s lesson at the tavern table. With the dishes cleared away, the men got out their notebooks and followed along as Curtis held up each plant in turn, pronouncing its Latin and common names and pointing out the sexual organs and other features that would help the students identify it in the wild. He explained the plant’s uses, if any, for medicine or agriculture. He taught Hosack and the other men how to press and dry their own specimens at home, then mount and label each one on a large sheet of cream-colored paper. Each student would thus have the beginnings of his own herbarium—a collection of dried specimens that they could consult and expand in the years to come. As Curtis talked about each plant, his world-weary air fell away and he “glowed with youthful fire.” His passion for the natural world ignited Hosack’s imagination.

  * It is still in circulation today as Curtis’s Botanical Magazine.

  † This tavern, which would later figure in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, still welcomes guests today.

  Chapter 3

  “RIPPING OPEN MY BELLY”

  THAT AUTUMN, HOSACK CEASED HIS DAILY VISITS TO CURTIS. The cooler weather that was now thinning out the Brompton beds was excellent for another kind of harvest: the bodies of the dead collected from gibbets and poorhouses for the use of medical gentlemen. This was the start of the dissection season, when corpses retained their freshness longer than in the summer heat.

  London, Hosack had discovered, was not only the capital of botany. It was also the capital of anatomy. He had studied the structures of the human body to the best of his ability in New York, Philadelphia, and Edinburgh, but it was in London that physicians were practicing anatomy with the most sophistication, thanks to William and John Hunter, the brothers who had taught Hosack’s former New York teacher Richard Bayley. Hosack refused to leave for the United States before he had studied with London’s great anatomists. He could put his growing knowledge of medical botany to better use for his future patients if he knew much more about blood, nerves, tissue, and organs. He now trained his attention on the slippery inner world of the human body.

  In London, medical instruction mostly took place in hospitals and private medical schools—unlike in Edinburgh, with its great university. In 1746, before dissection bore even the thin patina of respectability it had acquired by the time Hosack arrived in London, William Hunter had opened a private medical school where each student was allowed to practice on a corpse of his own. Two years later, William’s younger brother John, a carpenter by trade, joined him at the school as an assistant. John soon surpassed everyone, including William, in the painstaking art of anatomical preparation. For the next four and a half decades, John Hunter, sometimes working with his brother, sometimes alone, conducted hundreds of surgeries, dissections, and vivisections in an effort to understand the functioning of human and animal bodies. John Hunter worked and lived in a mess of pickled tumors and live animals. He sawed the heads off corpses and discovered the nerves responsible for the sense of smell. He injected milk into the intestines of a living dog to show that it did not enter the bloodstream, thus proving decisively that the lymphatic system is distinct from the circulatory system. He taught hundreds of medical students anatomy and surgery over the course of the eighteenth century. Among them, in the early 1770s, was a young man named Edward Jenner, who would perform the first documented cowpox inoculation twenty-five years later. Together, the Hunter brothers did more than anyone else in history to make dissection central to medical education.

  Now, several times a week, Hosack wound his way through Holborn to a little dead-end lane called Thavies Inn, where he was taking classes at Dr. Andrew Marshal’s medical school. Marshal had learned his craft from the Hunters and by 1785 had set up his own medical school. Although he was considered a poor public speaker, his talents as an anatomist came shining through during his in-class demonstrations. A fellow student of Hosack’s later recalled that when Marshal lectured on a brandished body part, “you saw it with your own eyes, exactly as he described it, and noticed every peculiarity of its shape and appearance.”

  Marshal’s specialty was the brain. He dissected the heads of the insane with particular relish and was always ready with a memorable example, like the case of Tommy Pearson, a fourteen-year-old butcher’s apprentice who had gone mad after a stray dog bit him in the summer of 1787. Froth had sputtered out of the boy’s mouth as he screamed at his nurse that Satan had entered his hospital room. “I see two girls, and a black boy; and the boy’s belly is ripped up.” The invisible fiend had then turned on him. “It cuts me; cuts Tommy’s hand off! . . . Ripping open my belly!” When Marshal dissected the boy’s body a few days later, he found excess moisture between the outer layers of the brain, an anomaly he had noticed in many other dissected brains of the insane.

  Most riveting for his students were the dissections he conducted before their very eyes. In 1793, the year Hosack was studying with him, Marshal peeled apart the brain of a demented fifty-two-year-old woman who had died at the St. Clement’s workhouse. He also sawed into the tall, muscular corpse of a former marine sergeant who had been permanently hospitalized with violent fits. The sergeant had been prone to disobedience unless an orderly barked at him, “All hands a-high.” Then he sprang to attention and followed orders. During the autopsy, Marshal squeezed the sergeant’s brain and found it “very hard” and “the ventricles distended with water.” The autopsies Hosack watched and conducted at Marshal’s school helped him better understand how different diseases affected the organs and tissue. They didn’t provide a fail-safe guide to treatment, but now when presented with a sick patient he would have a clearer picture of what was happening inside the body and how to try to address it. For example, swollen ankles were filled with water and would call for a diuretic plant remedy, while a turgid abdomen needed a purgative. Fever accompanied with a racing pulse might be eased with a sudorific, to induce sweating.

  H
osack’s entrance ticket to Dr. Andrew Marshal’s anatomy course

  Much as Hosack loved medical botany, he knew that plant-based remedies would not be enough in dire situations. Broken bones, pus-filled lungs, gunshot wounds, cancerous breasts—these and so many more disasters would require surgery, about which he knew little as yet. London’s surgeons had the great advantage over American doctors of their thorough anatomical training. Hosack began shadowing Dr. James Earle, chief surgeon at the storied St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in Holborn. He watched intently as Earle and his colleagues examined their nervous patients and then opened leather pouches to select the right tools for the job: knives, saws, bone nippers, perhaps a trephine for drilling a hole in the skull. There was a scoop especially designed to extract a bullet. And there was a “curved trocar for puncturing the bladder per rectum”—as advertised by a leading London purveyor of surgical instruments.