Teenage boys do not naturally favor the folding of exuberant limbs into hard-angled wooden desks. To rally them to his cause, Hosack joked, charmed, and seduced. He made himself master of the double entendre, of the vivid personal anecdote. The dullest fact somehow became fascinating as it crossed his lips. Young men from all over the United States began flocking to Columbia, where they “were ever anxious for the hour of his lecture to arrive,” one student observed. They struggled to keep up with his nimble mind as they dashed his words across the pages of their notebooks. “Dr. H. thinks that Brown and Dr. Danvin were fools. Dr. H. is of the opinion that the system of induction pursued by Lord Bacon and Sir Isaac Newton, has contributed more to the advancement of knowledge than any other method pursued. Physicians have a greater variety of facts to record than any other persons.”
His students came to admire, even revere him. One student who spent many hours in his classroom later summed up Hosack’s gifts. “Let it be sufficient to remark that, distinguished beyond all his competitors in the healing art, for a long series of years, he was acknowledged by every hearer, to have been the most eloquent and impressive teacher of scientific medicine and clinical practice that this country has produced.” Another student described Hosack’s “fine, manly, and commanding voice” and his “graceful, powerful” gestures. “No reader can imagine them. He must have heard, and have seen the man, to understand what he was in the lecture room.” Privately, his students were just as effusive. A young man named Moses Champion reflected on Hosack’s appeal in a letter home. “His lectures on Obstetrics are both instructing and very amusing. When he undertakes to please he is as good as the theatre.”
Hosack exhorted these future physicians to cultivate a gentle bedside manner. “Make frequent visits to the sick,” he told them. “Record their age, their sex, their occupation, their temperament, their general external appearances. Patiently listen to the history of their complaints.” He railed against drinking, gambling, and attending horse races as “altogether incompatible” with the dignity of a physician. He humiliated any student who arrived after the start of class, ordering him front and center for a dressing-down, because a tardy physician could kill a patient. One student later recalled, “The punishment was terrible, yet all loved him.” Medicine was a sacred profession that demanded complete dedication and discipline. “From a want of proper guidance and instruction,” he told a group of students early in his teaching career, “I have observed some among you betrayed into habits of inattention.” Indeed, one young scholar who was scribbling away as Hosack spoke about allergic reactions missed a key word when he wrote down in his notebook that “a Lady, with whom Dr. H. was in company, suddenly became faintish, insisting there were some Poppies (Puppies?) roasted in the room.” Or maybe it was one of Hosack’s frequent joking asides.
Hosack taught his young men to respect the past and present masters of medicine—Hippocrates, Paracelsus, Boerhaave, Rush, and others—but also urged them to take up every treatise with wits sharpened and skepticism at the ready. “Remember that period of superstition, in which it was supposed that diseases were inflicted by evil spirits, and were only to be cured by charms and incantations.” They must always be on their guard, he warned them, for “there is a sort of fashion in medicine as well as in dress.” It was on the topic of choosing medicines that he grew most heated. He suspected that many of his fellow doctors were drawn to the grand gesture, with sometimes fatal results for their patients. Hosack would never completely reject the prevailing humoral approach, yet he advocated ever greater precision in diagnosis, arguing that the proper treatment was not a drastic assault on the whole bodily system via bleeding or purging, but gentler medicines aimed at the primary ailment.
Those medicines, he told his students, could often be found in the plant world. One student later recalled that when Hosack spoke on “the beautiful science of botany,” he added “charm to a discourse already beaming with observations of the highest import to humanity.” He offered them the example of agaric, a tree fungus that would staunch the bleeding in the case of a hemorrhage. He spoke to them of Peruvian bark, of Carolina pinkroot, of sassafras, of butternut—each had its medicinal uses, he explained, and there were hundreds, maybe thousands more. All known botanical remedies, he would tell his students year after year, must be committed to memory and tested against the living, breathing, and dying evidence of one’s patients. When he insisted to them that plants “cannot be thrown aside as [a] mere matter of speculative inquiry,” he was clearly remembering an objection he had heard before. Perhaps his proposal to the very practical gentlemen of the New-York State Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts, and Manufactures had been dismissed with precisely this sentiment.
Beyond the city’s border, the riches of a whole continent were flourishing and dying each year, uncatalogued and unused. Hosack whipped up the students with talk of the “immense treasures of America” and the “great reputation” awaiting the man who devoted himself to the discovery of new medicines. He showed them colored engravings of plants and lent them his botanical books, but he also echoed William Curtis by urging them to leave the classroom for the meadows and woodlands surrounding New York. Here poisonous plants mingled with the benign and the medicinal. The doctor who could not distinguish among them toyed with the lives of his patients, he told them, using phrases he had heard from Curtis. “How degrading,” he said, for “the Physician not to know his food from his poison, [to] mistake a Hemlock for a Parsley, or the leaves of Foxglove for those of Mullein!” Hosack meant to spare his students embarrassment. More to the point, though, he meant to spare their future patients improper treatment or outright poisoning. The United States deserved doctors just as knowledgeable and skilled as Europe’s.
But his task was Herculean. He had no botanical garden.
Chapter 5
“THE GRASS IS THREE FEET HIGH IN THE STREETS”
THERE WAS AN AMERICAN GARDEN OUT THERE. HOSACK KNEW that perfectly well. On a pretty, sloping riverside farm to the west of Philadelphia, a man named William Bartram presided over what many people considered the most important collection of plants in North America.
Bartram lived for plants. He was a very shy man who felt most at ease working in his garden or botanizing in the wild. He spent years collecting in the American South, broke his leg in a twenty-foot fall while gathering seeds from a cypress tree, and at the behest of a curious medical student gamely swallowed some pills made from bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis). He got a headache and vomited twice, but it was entirely worth the trouble in the service of medical botany.
The garden on the Schuylkill River that William Bartram ran with help from one of his brothers, John Bartram Jr., had been founded by their father in 1728. In the 1730s, the senior John Bartram had joined forces with a plant-worshipping merchant in England named Peter Collinson. Their arrangement had John Bartram traveling in pursuit of plants all over the American colonies, then returning to his farm on the Schuylkill to cultivate specimens and prepare them for shipping to Collinson, who sold them to collectors around Europe. Visitors to John Bartram’s nursery outside Philadelphia had to time their visits carefully to catch him at home, but if they did, they would find him tending to “his Idol Flowers” and “his darling productions,” in the words of his friend Alexander Garden (for whom the gardenia is named).* In Europe, Linnaeus himself eagerly awaited shipments from Bartram. While men like Collinson lusted after the showiest and rarest American specimens that Bartram could find, systematic botanists—Linnaeus foremost—wanted every plant, no matter how humble or plain. Bartram’s own interests likewise encompassed the entirety of the plant world. Not only the most striking blooms but also agricultural crops and medicinal plants enthralled him.
In 1738, Bartram had made an electrifying discovery: an American species of ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) growing near the Susquehanna River. Chinese ginseng was well known to Asian and European doctors as one of the most versatile and pote
nt medicinal plants in the world. Benjamin Franklin was so excited that Bartram had found ginseng growing wild in America that he published an announcement in the Pennsylvania Gazette. Bartram’s discovery gave fuel to Franklin’s belief that the “Mountains and Swamps in America” were filled with plants “whose Virtues and proper Uses are yet unknown to Physicians.” Franklin tried to raise subscription funds for Bartram to go in search of these plants. When this failed, he and Bartram decided to focus instead on creating an American edition of a British guide to medicinal plants: Thomas Short’s Medicina Britannica. For their new edition, which Franklin published in 1751, Bartram wrote little editorials regarding which of the plants in Short’s lists could be found growing wild in North America. He wrote, for example, that a decoction made from the roots of horse weed (Collinsonia canadensis) “is much commended for Womens After-pains,” and that Native Americans drank a juice made from the roots of an orange-flowered plant called pleurisy root (Asclepias tuberosa) to fight dysentery. (Also known as butterfly milkweed, Asclepias tuberosa can be highly toxic.)
John Bartram sparked a passion for medicinal plants in his children. Two sons, Isaac and Moses, became apothecaries and ran a shop together in Philadelphia, where they dispensed herbal medicines made from such plants as saffron, valerian, and juniper berries, alongside chemical and mineral remedies derived from mercury, saltpeter, and other such substances. John Bartram also tried hard to persuade his son William to become a physician or apothecary, but it was probably his own fault that William refused to leave the garden and coop himself up in a shop or clinic, because when William was a teenager his father had taken him on botanizing trips up and down the Eastern Seaboard. William loved botanizing so much, in fact, that in 1773 he embarked on a four-year plant-gathering expedition of his own. It would result in one of the most influential pieces of nature writing ever to come out of North America.
It took him until 1791 to bring the story of his travels to the reading public. When readers finally opened the long-awaited volume—begun in a British colony and published in a newly independent America—they discovered that the title alone traversed a lengthy distance down the page: Travels through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws; containing An Account of the Soil and Natural Productions of those Regions, together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians. In the pages of his Travels, Bartram brought to gripping life the perils and wonders of the American natural world. He described, for example, the moment two large alligators tried to overturn his canoe, “roaring terribly and belching floods of water over me” and snapping their powerful jaws together “as almost to stun me” with the din. As he flailed at the beasts with a club, Bartram “expected every moment to be dragged out of the boat and instantly devoured,” but they sank back into the water. As he made his way back to his garden on the Schuylkill, Bartram carried a prayer book in his pack, the gift of a Charleston friend named Mary Lamboll Thomas; he later told her the book had brought him comfort “on those dangerous & dubious scenes in my Travels.”
Yet Bartram had also encountered landscapes of serene botanical beauty and was just as adept at capturing these for his readers. “Observe these green meadows how they are decorated,” he wrote. “They seem enamelled with the beds of flowers.” After Bartram’s Travels appeared, a young Philadelphia physician named Benjamin Smith Barton gushed that “no man in America is so constantly employed in reflecting on the beauties and the wonder of Creation.” Barton especially appreciated the fact that Bartram valued medicinal plants, and the two men corresponded about some of the botanical remedies Bartram had seen in use among Native American peoples—for example, a holly tree (Ilex cassine) that contained caffeine and was “the most powerful & efficacious vegetable Diuretick yet known” because “its effects are almost instantaneous.”
Benjamin Smith Barton, who had made the pilgrimage to study medicine in Edinburgh just a few years before Hosack, believed that “the man who discovers one valuable new medicine is a more important Benefactor to his species than Alexander, Caesar, or an hundred other conquerors.” Although William Bartram did not incline to such bombast, he did agree that plant discoveries were critical to the progress of American medicine. Around 1796, following in his father’s footsteps and likely working with his brothers Moses and Isaac, Bartram prepared a small pharmacopoeia, a catalogue of medicines with instructions for preparation and dosage. This new catalogue took its inspiration from the sorts of volumes Hosack had just spent two years lugging around Great Britain, especially the Edinburgh New Dispensatory and William Cullen’s Treatise on the Materia Medica. Bartram’s pharmacopoeia followed Cullen’s innovative decision to organize medicines not alphabetically but by their effects on the body: diuretics, diaphoretics, purgatives, and so on.
Among the plants featured in Bartram’s new Philadelphia pharmacopoeia were many that were now known to be growing in North America—thanks in large part to the Bartrams themselves. This project of identifying native medicinal plants was no mere exercise in systematic botany. It was a matter of life and death, for while Benjamin Smith Barton and William Bartram corresponded about Ilex cassine, and Moses and Isaac Bartram boiled medicinal plants at their apothecary shop, Americans were being felled by fevers, tumors, infections, and a host of other disorders and disasters whose cures might be growing in the swamps of Florida, in the mountains of North Carolina, or even in the woods just outside of Philadelphia. Hosack knew how much the Bartrams had done for botany, especially medical botany. But almost half a century had elapsed since Franklin had published John Bartram’s 1751 update of Thomas Short’s Medicina Britannica, and it was still among the most comprehensive works on American medicinal plants. What the nation needed, Hosack thought, was a new kind of garden—a botany classroom, chemical laboratory, apothecary shop, plant nursery, horticulture school, and lovely landscape all rolled into one. The kind of garden that was already pushing up its first pale shoots in his mind.
HOSACK SPENT MORE AND MORE HOURS in 1795 dreaming of his garden, but he was an unknown, impecunious young doctor. He needed public goodwill and financial support to bring it to life. Then, at the end of the year, an unexpected invitation cleared a path for Hosack straight into the heart of national politics and the most fashionable houses in New York. It came from Samuel Bard, President Washington’s former physician.
Bard, now in his fifties, had a jutting lower lip and deep lines that etched permanent parentheses around his nose and mouth. He was big-hearted and genial, a sturdy pillar of New York medicine. During medical studies in Edinburgh in the 1760s, Bard had won a botany medal and written a thesis on the medical effects of opium, after testing it on his roommate and himself. In 1767, he had helped found New York City’s first medical school, at King’s College, and then the New-York Hospital a few years later. In clinical practice, Bard prized both compassion and honesty, telling his students to “remember always that your Patient is the Object of the tenderest Affection, to some one,” but also warning them that they should “never buoy up a dying Man with groundless Expectations of Recovery.”
Samuel Bard, Hosack’s mentor and medical partner
Bard was a founding member of the New-York State Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts, and Manufactures, and probably one of the few people who had mentally rejoiced at Hosack’s proposal for a hortus siccus. Bard knew this was not the first effort at cataloguing New York’s flora, for as a boy he had once been sent to recuperate from a childhood illness in the fresh country air at an estate named Coldengham, where a talented young botanist named Jane Colden had taught him Linnaean botany. Jane’s father was the wealthy and powerful Cadwallader Colden, a passionate plantsman who would later become lieutenant governor of the province of New York, serving until the outbreak of the American Revolution. Linnaeus once called him “Summus Perfectus” and also named a flower for him. Colden encouraged hi
s daughter’s interest in botany, and at Coldengham she met John Bartram Sr. and William Bartram, as well as Linnaeus’s student Pehr Kalm. In the 1740s, Jane produced ink drawings and descriptions of more than three hundred plants growing in the vicinity of her father’s estate, up the Hudson River near Poughkeepsie. In 1756, the British merchant Peter Collinson wrote Linnaeus that Jane Colden “is perhaps the first lady that has so perfectly studied your system. She deserves to be celebrated.” Her New York flora manuscript was never published, but Bard knew about it from his time studying with her, and he had remained deeply interested in botany ever since.
When Hosack joined Columbia in 1794, he had become Bard’s colleague on the medical faculty. As they talked about medicine and botany, the older man came to see Hosack as a possible professional heir. Bard dreamed of retiring to his splendid estate up the Hudson at Hyde Park, where he could enjoy his family and his views of the Catskill Mountains. Toward the close of 1795, Bard invited Hosack to join him as the junior partner in his private practice. Bard soon became deeply attached to his diligent new protégé, viewing him as a surrogate son just as Benjamin Rush did. Paternal warmth suffuses a Christmas note Bard later sent Hosack from Hyde Park. “My dear Hosack,” he wrote, “I cannot express my wishes for your happiness at this season of festivity and congratulation, in stronger terms, than that, at my time of life you may sit down to a festive family board with feelings of equal enjoyment, and sentiments of equal gratitude for similar blessings.”
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