American Eden

by Victoria Johnson

  Hosack confided his hopes to Rush in a letter just after the Mohawk reached New York in late August 1794. He first relayed greetings from a number of his Edinburgh teachers and inquired whether the so-called Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania had been put down. (It hadn’t.) He was asking, Hosack told Rush, not because of “the immediate evils” threatened by the uprising but because he hated the British to have any cause for smugness about the fortunes of the United States. Then Hosack turned to his grand plans, telling Rush that Banks, Smith, and Curtis had introduced him to botanical gardens, sparking his new love of natural history in general and botany in particular. He was now ready to hurl himself into what he called the “almost untrodden field” of American natural history. He planned to study zoology in the winters and botany in the summers, with mineralogy stuffed into the chinks of his schedule. He also wanted to get his hands on every possible genus of animal, because he hoped to dissect them and prove American scientists misguided in their focus on superficial nomenclatural quarrels when they should really be investigating internal animal structures to discover similarities and differences (an astute insight in the pre-Darwinian era).

  Even as he wrote these lines, Hosack realized that he sounded ambitious in an age when overt ambition was frowned upon, and he tried to preempt Rush’s reaction: “You will say this is a great undertaking for an individual.” He conceded that his plan would take a whole lifetime but insisted that “on the score of Industry & inclination I feel myself secure.” The twenty-five-year-old Hosack knew by now that he was most cheerful and energetic when mentally absorbed in efforts to improve the health and comfort of people around him.

  IF HOSACK HAD CHOSEN to settle nearer to Rush that autumn, he would have had an easier time pursuing his scientific dreams. It was not simply that Rush had become a father figure who encouraged Hosack through gentle sparring matches and liberal praise. It was that in Philadelphia, of all cities in the United States, natural history reigned supreme. Philadelphians thought they inhabited the Athens of America, to the annoyance of many New Yorkers. The credit for Philadelphia’s stature was due largely to Franklin, Jefferson, and Rush, but their friend Charles Willson Peale, a talented painter and naturalist who would loom large in Hosack’s life, had plenty to do with it, too. After fighting in the Revolutionary War, Peale had founded a museum of art and natural history—known simply as Peale’s Museum—in his large house at the corner of Third and Lombard Streets. He believed in the uplifting effects of scientific education on American men, women, and children alike and saw his museum as a way to help fashion an educated citizenry. Peale was a bouncing optimist who would never in his long life lose his childlike wonder at the natural world. In a speech he gave in the 1790s, he insisted that natural history “ought to become a NATIONAL CONCERN, since it is a NATIONAL GOOD.”

  Peale inspired strong support for his museum from his circle of Philadelphia friends. Franklin was one of the first contributors to the collection, donating the body of an angora cat he had brought back (alive) from his tour of duty as the American minister in Paris. Over the next few years, Peale assembled the most comprehensive array of plant and animal specimens in the United States—hundreds of mounted mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles, labeled according to their Linnaean classifications and arranged in naturalistic settings. He put live animals on display, too, and sometimes he stuffed them after they died.

  Despite the undeniable draw of exotic specimens, Peale tried to prioritize education over shock value or novelty. “I neglect many little contrivances which might serve to catch the Eye of the gaping multitude,” he confided to a friend. He showcased the most humdrum American species alongside the unfamiliar ones. He found a natural ally in Jefferson, with whom he shared a passion for all things scientific and whose politics he found congenial as well. Jefferson began serving as the president of the museum board in February 1792. Hamilton joined the board, too, setting aside partisan politics in favor of the national scientific interest and running at least one meeting when Jefferson couldn’t make it.

  Peale’s Museum contributed to Philadelphia’s reputation as the center of scientific knowledge in the United States. He added even more luster to the city with his own paintings, which many people considered among the best works of art produced in the country up to then. Famous Americans and illustrious visitors from abroad clamored to have their portraits done. In 1791, shortly before Jefferson and Hamilton joined his museum board, Peale painted portraits of each of them; he had first painted George Washington in 1772 and eventually completed seven portraits of him from life. Peale was the patriarch of a fantastically talented family, and his son Rembrandt likewise became a frequent painter of Washington and Jefferson. Some of Rembrandt’s brothers—Rubens, Raphaelle, Titian, and Benjamin Franklin Peale—also inherited their father’s outsize talents in painting and science. Charles Willson Peale’s daughters, several of whom were named for female painters, also received training in the arts, but they were less free than their brothers to pursue their talents outside the domestic sphere. Hosack would come to know many of the Peale children well, and Rembrandt would paint Hosack’s portrait more than once.

  In March 1794, Peale named his latest child Charles Linnaeus Peale. “The first Linnaeus perhaps so named in America was born this morning,” he wrote happily to a friend. “May he be a light to this New World, like him of Sweden whose percevering labours in Natural History hath eluminated the Old World.” (Peale had creative spelling.) The baby’s first name was soon dropped from use. He also acquired a nickname: Lin.

  BUT TO HOSACK, New York felt most like home, and he intended to stay there. After he returned from Britain, he and Kitty moved into a house at 60 Maiden Lane, a few blocks from his parents’ house (and just steps from the house at 57 Maiden Lane where Jefferson had held his dinner party for Madison and Hamilton in 1790). Hosack began setting up his medical office in rooms at home, the customary arrangement for a private practice. He needed surgical equipment such as drills, amputation saws, trocars, lancets, syringes, catheters, and pliers for pulling teeth. He also needed pillboxes, ointment pots, stoppered bottles, and vials, all of which he bought at Joel and Jotham Post’s medical supply shop at the corner of Wall and William Streets.

  Some of his medicines he prepared from scratch, but others he had no choice but to purchase from the shops. At Philips & Clark, a druggists’ shop just up Maiden Lane from his house, he bought spermaceti, which served as an ointment base for rubbing medicines into patients’ itchy or oozing skin. He also bought smelling salts and mercury. Hosack felt deeply ambivalent about mercury, because it exhausted patients and made their gums so raw and soft that their teeth often fell out. He reluctantly decided to keep it on hand (in the form of calomel pills), but he much preferred remedies that came from the plant kingdom. He bought myrrh, made from a tropical tree resin into reddish drops that could be dissolved in water and prescribed to induce a mild sweat. Another sudorific Hosack bought at Philips & Clark was camphor, produced from the tropical Laurus camphora tree (today it is called Cinnamomum camphora). It is used externally as an oil or salve today, but eighteenth-century doctors prescribed camphor pills or powder for internal use. In high doses, ingested camphor could provoke more vomiting than desired, in which case the Edinburgh New Dispensatory recommended prescribing opium pills—which Hosack also purchased.

  His home office readied, he circulated word that he was prepared to receive patients. In the tradition of the era, he was also seeking private pupils who wished to supplement their courses at Columbia College by apprenticing with a practicing physician. New York was still chronically short of doctors, and in that first year Hosack earned about $1,500 from his practice (about $30,000 today). It was a respectable showing for a new doctor, but when a professorship in botany opened up at Columbia in the spring of 1795, he put his name forward.

  Columbia’s outgoing professor of botany, Samuel Latham Mitchill, helped Hosack secure the position. Mitchill, who was not much older than
Hosack, had decided to become a doctor after watching his five-year-old brother die of croup; he later told Hosack that as a grown man he could still hear his brother’s “distressful croaking” and “suffocating anguish.” Mitchill had trained at Edinburgh before Hosack, and by the time Hosack returned to New York in 1794, Mitchill was already one of the most prominent local physicians. He was the clear heir to the revered John Charlton and also to Samuel Bard, the doctor who had operated on President Washington’s thigh in June 1789.

  Hosack would have owned a medicine chest much like this one, which belonged to his friend Rufus King

  A staunch Democratic-Republican, Mitchill idolized Jefferson and would later observe that when it came to the encouragement of the natural sciences in the United States, there could be no doubt that Jefferson had done more “than all the Presidents of the United States severally and jointly.” Mitchill loved the American wilderness so much that he once tried to prove that the Garden of Eden must have been located in upstate New York, just outside of Syracuse at Onondaga Lake. He spent his days pursuing polymathic studies in chemistry, botany, medicine, history, literature, moral philosophy, and political theory. Yet Mitchill’s chief interest was chemistry, and he had decided to shed his botanical responsibilities at Columbia. His timing could not have been better for Hosack, who apparently sat down with him at some point that winter to discuss his recent studies at the Brompton Botanic Garden and the Linnean Society. In February 1795, Mitchill wrote a letter to Columbia’s president saying that the twenty-five-year-old Dr. Hosack was a person of “zeal, Industry and Talents.” Hosack was hired. From that moment forward, Mitchill would be a constant presence in Hosack’s life, their relationship vacillating from warm collegiality to cutthroat competition and back again.

  Samuel Latham Mitchill, Hosack’s Columbia colleague, friend, and rival

  While Hosack waited for his Columbia appointment to be announced publicly, he sorted through the specimens he had brought back from London. He had decided to donate a little herbarium collection of foreign grasses—about sixty in all—to a local group called the New-York State Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts, and Manufactures. The society had been founded in 1791 by Mitchill and other New York men hoping to foster American independence through agricultural improvement. Hosack thought there might be specimens in his collection that New York farmers could profitably cultivate.

  The New-York State Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts, and Manufactures had a strong practical bent. Its charter explicitly discouraged members from “performances intended to display literature and erudition.” The very first query issued to the public was a call for farmers and estate owners to nominate the best varieties of manure. The society’s members met once a month when the New York legislature was in session in the city. In a room at City Hall on Wall Street, they argued over questions like whether cast iron or wrought iron was better for making plowshares (the winner was cast iron) and how to help the state’s farmers raise more barley to supply the city’s brewers. At these meetings, Hosack could rub shoulders with New York’s most powerful figures—men such as former governor George Clinton, Chancellor of New York Robert R. Livingston, and the chancellor’s brother, Edward Livingston. (John Jay, still in London, was also a member.) Some of these men had more than a quarter century on Hosack, but he wasn’t in the least intimidated. In the spring of 1795, flush with his new expertise, he decided to school the society’s members on botany by means of an open letter addressed to Chancellor Livingston, the state’s highest judicial officer and the man who had administered the oath of office to President Washington. When the letter was read aloud at a meeting (possibly by Hosack himself), the men in the room encountered the fervor for civic improvement that would fill Hosack’s waking hours for decades to come. Hosack was proposing that every member of the society be deputized to collect specimens of all the plants currently growing in the state of New York. Together, these citizen-scientists would compile the state’s first complete hortus siccus—literally, a “dry garden.” This trove would permit systematic research and experimentation for the good of the state and the nation.

  Hosack informed the men he would be happy to organize the assembled specimens according to their “Botanic Order” in the Linnaean system, adding that Smith and Curtis were standing by to lend their expertise from across the Atlantic. Thanks to his Brompton studies, Hosack knew how to collect a good specimen, and he gave the society members a detailed description of his favorite approach, which “after various trials . . . I find to be the least troublesome and the most successful.” They should botanize only in fine weather in order to obtain totally dry specimens for pressing. Each specimen must include the plant’s flower and leaf so it would be clearly identifiable later. Tree or shrub specimens should take the form of a small branch with “the flowers and some of the most perfect leaves.” The specimens should then be placed between sheets of “soft spungy paper” and pressed in “a machine contrived for this purpose”—a wooden herbarium press. If no herbarium press was available, a stack of heavy books would suffice. Hosack warned them to change the blotting paper once a day until the specimen was completely dried; otherwise, mold might set in.

  But Hosack had misdirected his enthusiasm. The New-York State Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts, and Manufactures was no Linnean Society. Systematic botany, untethered as it was from the practical concerns of farming and manufacturing, failed to interest most of its members. The idea sank like a rock and disappeared from view.

  HOSACK’S BOTANICAL HOPES may have been crushed, but his medical practice was soon flourishing, as he attracted patients and students alike to his private practice.

  In May 1795, nine months after his return to New York, Hosack was summoned to an exciting case. The captain of an East India trading ship, an otherwise healthy man in his midforties, had been suffering for six years from a swollen scrotum. Each year, the swelling had continued to increase, the captain told Hosack, who in turn explained the possible treatments for a hydrocele. The captain elected to undergo the very procedure Hosack had learned from Dr. James Earle at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London the previous year. With three other physicians gathered around him to watch, he performed the procedure for the first time recorded on American soil. Using a trocar, Hosack withdrew a pint of foul-smelling fluid from the bulging flesh and injected a mixture of alcohol and water. He then applied a poultice of bread and water and prescribed regular spoonfuls of laudanum to ease the pain. In three weeks’ time, the captain reported himself fully recovered and ready to command his next voyage to the East Indies.

  Shortly after this, Columbia finalized Hosack’s appointment as its new professor of botany. Botany was usually offered during the summer term to take advantage of the growing season, and Hosack would give his first lecture on June 15 at College Hall. It was still one of the most imposing structures in town, with its cupola and gables. Just outside the fence enclosing the college yard, prostitutes loitered as young men in black robes went gusting past on their way to class. That year’s crop of botany students filed into a classroom and inspected their new professor.

  Quite young. A bit on the portly side.

  Yet Hosack turned out to be surprisingly quick on his feet and animated in his gestures. As he lectured, he drew on the oratorical skills that had won him a prize in his college days, radiating the intellectual authority of a far more seasoned teacher and scholar. He arrived in class with his notes heavily underlined so that he could make his main points with maximum force. “Dr. Hosack read his lectures, and no man was ever more emphatic, impressive and instructive,” one student later remembered. Another noticed that Hosack enrolled even his “very heavy black eyebrows” in his pedagogical efforts when he found it convenient to assume “a thunder-cloud frown.”

  The very first sentence of Hosack’s botany course seemed calculated to intimidate the novice. “Natural History considering the term in its greatest latitude may be said t
o comprehend a knowledge of every part of the universe,” he declared, before skating across the fields of meteorology, hydrography, geology, and mineralogy. Finally he settled down to the topic at hand: the study of “the vegetables which clothe and adorn” the planet. He reviewed the definitions of plants proffered over the centuries by a starry roster of scientists, including Linnaeus, Herman Boerhaave, and Joseph Pitton de Tournefort. He couldn’t resist mentioning his recent access to Linnaeus’s manuscripts, which he “had an opportunity of observing . . . in the possession of my friend and preceptor Dr. Smith of London.”

  Over the next weeks, Hosack channeled Linnaeus, Smith, and Curtis as he led his young charges on a self-assured tour of the botanical world. Laying out plant specimens like bodies on a dissecting table, he revealed their inner structures with his knife—epidermis, cortex, lignum, medulla—and then he sliced open minuscule seeds to show them the cotyledons and radicles that held new life. He taught them the critical differences among grasses, ferns, fungi, and mosses. He explained how leaves functioned “in the vegetable economy as organs of respiration.” He told them that plants are nature’s “instruments by which she corrects the impurities of the air.” He called their attention to the intricate rhythms of the natural world, where the life cycles of insects, birds, and animals align perfectly with those of the plants that sustain them. He pointed out that if these creatures “were produced at a time when those plants did not flower, [they] would necessarily perish for want of food.”