John Wakefield Francis was a native New Yorker whose father had died in the yellow-fever epidemic that had so terrified New York City in 1795. Francis, then a small boy, had fallen so ill from the fever that he had a vivid memory of a coffin being brought into his sickroom. After his father’s death, Francis’s mother had managed to send him to the best New York schools and then to Columbia. Hosack recognized in the young John Francis all the attributes he valued most—intelligence, curiosity, self-discipline, and energy—and he invited Francis to study with him both in his private clinic and at the Elgin garden. Another physician later described Francis as “the prince of good fellows,” praising him in the same terms often used for Hosack: a sense of humor, a talent for lecturing and storytelling, a quick intelligence, and a rich voice. Francis was also deeply racist. It is unclear whether he acquired those views before or after meeting Hosack, but in 1808 he gave a medical lecture to other physicians, probably including Hosack, on “the Bodily & Mental Inferiority of the Negro.”
Francis found in Hosack a mentor and surrogate father, and he began boarding at the Hosacks’ house, where he became, in Mary’s words, “a member of our family.” From this intimate perch, Francis now saw firsthand what enormous sums Hosack was spending on the botanical garden. Later in life, Francis would remark that Hosack had always thought of money solely as the means to execute his ambitious projects: “Had he the wealth of John Jacob Astor, he might have died poor.”
John Francis, Hosack’s closest medical protégé
IN LATE MAY 1806, the cool weather finally turned and Hosack decided he could safely bring out some of his exotics to bask in the Manhattan sunshine. Summer arrived, bringing pleasant, mild days and little of the poisonous humidity that always seemed to foreshadow the city’s yellow-fever outbreaks.
One morning around this time, Hosack went out for a walk on the banks of the Hudson and encountered a young man collecting plants. The man apologized in French for disturbing Hosack’s peace and introduced himself. He was Alire Raffeneau Delile, botanist to Emperor Napoleon. Hosack invited him home to breakfast.
Delile was nine years younger than Hosack, but he had already seen sights to entrance his host. In 1798, he had received an invitation from General Napoleon Bonaparte to join the scientific staff of his expedition to Egypt; Delile was to be in charge of collecting and cataloguing Egypt’s botanical specimens. Traveling with the fleet of one hundred ninety-four ships were more than one hundred sixty scientists, scholars, and artists. On the passage over, Napoleon reportedly preferred their company to that of his officers, and in the evenings, the future emperor sat talking with them around a heavy table in a lowceilinged room.
Napoleon intended to see the scientific and artistic treasures of the Nile Valley displayed in tidy rows on the shelves of Parisian laboratories and museums, so Delile hoisted himself onto a camel and began collecting plants. Within two days, his assistant died of the plague. In scalding heat he carried on alone, plucking fronds from the doum palm (Hyphaene thebaica) and marveling at the beautiful blue lotus (Nymphaea caerulea), sacred to the ancient Egyptians. He fell off a camel as it knelt to the sand; another camel sat on him. He named a new species of algae: Ulva fasciata, commonly known as sea lettuce. He took the first cast of what became known as the Rosetta Stone.* He founded the Cairo Botanical and Agricultural Garden in the backyard of an Egyptian villa, where he cultivated his recent plant discoveries and prepared specimens for his herbarium.
Then, on August 23, 1799, Napoleon abandoned Egypt for France, leaving Delile and the other scientists stranded, along with the increasingly beleaguered French forces. Delile continued to botanize until March 1801, when an army of Turks massed outside Cairo, at which point he fled to safety in the citadel. For the next six months, in a country beset by war and disease, Delile and his fellow scientists petitioned the French authorities for permission to return to France and for a vessel in which to make the voyage. They finally got a ship, but it sailed in September 1801 without Delile, because the British had attempted to confiscate his herbarium. He insisted to them that he would rather travel to England with his specimens than return to France without them. The British released Delile and his plants, and he managed to return to Paris.
When Hosack ran into Delile in the United States a few years later, it was thanks to a new posting by Napoleon, who had sent his brave botanist to pass the time in another sweltering river delta. This time it was the Cape Fear River in Wilmington, North Carolina, an important trading port where Delile became the new French commissioner for commercial relations with the United States. Delile was delighted to learn that he would also be continuing his botanical research on behalf of the French Empire, because he much preferred roaming the Carolina cypress forests to sweating over ships’ records in a claustrophobic office. The Empress Josephine, herself an avid botanist, had given Delile instructions to collect useful and pretty species from the Carolinas, and he happily obliged, on one occasion joining forces with François André Michaux to explore the mountains to the west.* Still, Delile eventually became bored with the sleepy life in Wilmington and moved north to Philadelphia, where he continued to botanize and began mingling in the sophisticated circles of the American Philosophical Society. Among his new Philadelphia friends was Hosack’s brother-in-law, Caspar Wistar. Delile also made friends with other émigré Frenchmen in the city; with one of them, he conducted experiments on the best way to cook and serve the American bullfrog.
It was likely Wistar or Michaux who recommended that Delile go to New York to meet Hosack. At any rate, when Hosack ran into Delile that morning by the Hudson, he quickly realized what a treasure he had found. Hosack himself was one of the few Americans who could understand a botanical obsession so fierce that it had nearly sent Delile sailing into enemy territory rather than let the British pry his hard-won Egyptian specimens from his hands. Hosack and Delile enjoyed their breakfast so much that Delile soon joined Francis in studying medicine and botany with Hosack at both Columbia and the garden. Delile also moved into 65 Broadway, and an emperor’s botanist became the newest member of Hosack’s household.
WHEN HE WASN’T AT COLUMBIA or up at the garden, Hosack was seeing patients and reading and writing medical articles. The city had recently begun keeping annual mortality records, and he was trying to understand the patterns. Infants appeared briefly in the world before perishing, snuffed out by events their doctors jotted down as the flux (dysentery), fever, jaundice, teething, infanticide. Dozens more babies arrived each year already dead, and mothers were still suffering horribly and dying in labor. No wonder some doctors thought, as Benjamin Rush observed, that in a way “child-bearing is a disease.” And of course women and men alike had a rich repertoire of other deaths to contemplate. In 1805 alone, according to their physicians, New Yorkers died of apoplexy (stroke), asthma, burns, cancer, consumption, convulsions, diabetes, dropsy (edema), frostbite, gout, hives, the “King’s Evil” (scrofula), liver disease, smallpox, syphilis, and dozens of other illnesses and accidents.
As New York’s doctors struggled to save and heal their patients, they were still working at a disadvantage compared to doctors in the largest European cities, where hospitals and medical schools provided more advanced training. New York’s doctors also still relied heavily on medicines shipped to the United States from Europe. Jacob Schiffelin’s apothecary shop on Pearl Street, for example, stocked anise seed, camphor oil, Peruvian bark, opium from Turkey, rhubarb from India, peppermint oil, ipecacuana, lemon essence, and many other plant-based medicinals, along with mineral-based remedies such as quicksilver, zinc, and Glauber salts. But what if Hosack could raise the foreign medicinal plants American doctors needed most? He was already growing some of the more delicate such specimens in his hothouses and greenhouse, and now he and Gentle were filling the outdoor beds with dozens of hardier species, among them many plants that William Curtis had been raising at Brompton when Hosack studied there. At Elgin, for example, Hosack had the purple-flowered
common bugloss (Anchusa officinalis), which could be mashed into a poultice that soothed skin inflamed by ulcers, hives, or burns; and he had sneezewort yarrow (Achillea ptarmica), the sun-loving European meadow flower whose roots could be turned into a powder to ease toothache. Nearby he was raising Roman nettle (Urtica pilulifera), a plant with serrated leaves and fuzzy little globes that looked charming enough for a child to play with. When brushed against the skin, the tiny hairs covering the globes released searing chemicals; Curtis had observed in the Flora Londinensis that “urtication, or whipping with stinging nettles, is an old practice” for stimulating a numb or rheumatic limb. Hosack planted chamomile and verbena, which made soothing teas, as did his several species of mullein (Verbascum). Along with his catnip (Nepeta cataria) and his mint plants (Mentha), he liked to prescribe mullein to patients suffering from dysentery.
Hosack was also cultivating and studying medicinals native to North America. He had already learned from Curtis and from the Edinburgh New Dispensatory about many such plants, and now in his own medicinal beds at Elgin he began planting dozens of them. He had the great blue lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica), for example, prized by the Cherokee people for coping with venereal disease, and also wood sorrel (Oxalis acetosella), whose leaves produced a delicious syrup used to reduce a high fever. He made sure to include the North American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius), which had so enraptured Benjamin Franklin when John Bartram had found it in the 1730s. The Iroquois, Mohegan, and other Native American peoples used American ginseng for a great variety of health conditions: as a fertility drug, as a painkiller in case of earaches or headaches, as eyedrops for infected eyes, to help stop vomiting, as a psychiatric drug, and more. Another Native American medicinal, Virginia snakeroot (Aristolochia serpentaria), was a species Hosack always made sure to mention in his medical lectures at Columbia; not long after he began raising this perennial at Elgin, he had found it effective in treating anthrax. Hosack also alerted his fellow New York physicians to a report about snakeroot that he received from a doctor in Maine, who had attended in a case of lockjaw so severe that the man’s mouth “would barely admit a goose-quill”—until snakeroot was injected between his clenched teeth.
Hosack was on a quest to collect every native medicinal plant he could gather locally or procure from his correspondents throughout the United States. His nephew Caspar brought him an herbaceous perennial called colicroot (Aletris farinosa), also sometimes called unicorn root because of the tall spike of white flowers that bloomed on its single stem between late spring and midsummer. Colicroot was a plant that John Bartram had once observed was “very plentiful in Jersey,” noting that a decoction of it was good for stomach and bowel pains. Another of Hosack’s native medicinals that was often used for upset bowels was skullcap (Scutellaria lateriflora), a pretty perennial with blue flowers that stuck out sideways. It was probably for its cough-alleviating properties that Hosack had planted his native hibiscus (Hibiscus moscheutos), which he called “Marsh Mallow Hibiscus”; from a related species, the ancient Egyptians had made a candy by mixing the sap with nuts and honey.
Among Hosack’s odder native medicinals was a carnivorous plant that Caspar had found on Paulus Hook. Called roundleaf sundew (Drosera rotundifolia), the plant glistened with a shiny secretion that lured insects. When an insect landed and got stuck, the leaf curled up tightly and slowly digested its victim’s body, extracting nutrients in the process. Some Native Americans fashioned a wart remover from sundew, and also a love potion. Hosack’s climbing bittersweet (Celastrus scandens) was a species sometimes used by native women as an analgesic for labor pains. In the late spring, bittersweet twined its rich green leaves and off-white flowers around the trees and fences; in the fall and winter, its round crimson seeds splashed brilliant color against the gray-brown landscape.
Caspar had found still other native medicinals growing right in New York City—for example, a white vervain (Verbena urticifolia), used by some women to reduce menstrual flow, and a sun-seeking elderberry (Sambucus canadensis), whose purply-black berries songbirds loved to gorge on; it also made a delicious wine. Physicians used the berries to brew a throat-clearing cough syrup prescribed especially in cases of croup. The bark of the elderberry also produced a very gentle cathartic for a constipated patient; its buds, by contrast, purged the bowels so violently that physicians generally avoided using them.
Hosack and his protégés were peering into the tangled edge of the unknown world, trying to discern the causes of human misery—and the cures. Delile, especially, was trailing Hosack everywhere these days. He had enrolled at Columbia to pursue an advanced medical degree under Hosack’s mentorship, allowing him to synthesize his botanical knowledge with expertise in medicine. Delile was conducting research for a thesis on pulmonary consumption (tuberculosis), and he knew that Hosack often cared for consumptives on his rounds at the state prison, the almshouse, and the hospital. He relied heavily on Hosack’s clinical experience as he analyzed the symptoms, causes, and treatments of consumption. The first signs a patient might notice, Delile wrote in his thesis, are a “slight chill, a quickened pulse, a burning of the hands and feet, a circumscribed redness of the cheeks.” Then, as the patient slowly began to waste away, “the balls of the eyes sink into their sockets” and the “nails . . . curve inwards.” Delile acknowledged that the causes of consumption were complex and varied, but he singled out several suspect practices. Sedentary hours spent hunched over a writing desk constricted the chest, for example, as did cobbling shoes all day, or wearing a corset. Better to spend one’s days hunting, building ships, or riding horses. Or gardening.
Delile’s admiration for Hosack shone through in his thesis, particularly when he talked about the known treatments for consumption. After briefly considering mineral-based medicines such as mercury (which he dismissed as ineffective) and blue vitriol (an emetic he liked), Delile turned to botanical approaches to consumption. Foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) was a toxic diuretic growing at Elgin. In the earliest stage of the illness, Delile noted, Hosack had seen foxglove work “like a charm,” while in later stages “it manifestly did harm.” Other Elgin plants reduced fever in consumptive patients, including horehound (Marrubium vulgare), Seneca snakeroot (Polygala senega), Virginia snakeroot (Aristolochia serpentaria), and fringed gentian (Gentiana crinita). Hosack’s favorite medicinal plant, boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum), was useful for fever, too.
It was around this time that François André Michaux returned to New York for a long visit. Delile reported in a letter to a friend at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris that he, Hosack, and Michaux frequently gathered to talk in Hosack’s “lovely library.” Here, as they debated what genus and species a particular plant belonged to, they could leap up at any moment to pull down volumes by Linnaeus, Jussieu, André Michaux, Curtis, Smith, and others. They could also consult Hosack’s precious Linnaean specimens. Delile informed his friend in Paris that Hosack was very generous in sharing his books and his herbarium.
Hosack had finally succeeded in re-creating the ambience of the Brompton Botanic Garden, where one could amble in from Curtis’s flowerbeds to consult a botanical volume in a peaceful nook that had felt “a thousand miles from London.” But a thousand miles from Manhattan—to the west—lay the prairies of North America, teeming with flowers and grains Hosack yearned to see and to study. He eagerly awaited the return of Lewis and Clark.
* Today the New-York Historical Society occupies a palatial building on Central Park West, and its vast collection of art and artifacts spans several centuries’ worth of American history.
† In 1799, when a French soldier named Bouchard spotted a stone covered with inscriptions near the city of Rosetta, Delile made a sulfur cast that would furnish the French people with their very first image of the stone. (Delile’s cast was later misplaced for almost two centuries in a back room at the Montpellier Archaeological Museum; it was rediscovered in 2010.) The Rosetta Stone itself sailed to Britain, arriving at Portsmouth on the ca
ptured French frigate L’Égyptienne in February 1802.
‡ In November 1802, François André’s father, André Michaux, died in Madagascar of fever. François André, who was hiking through the forests of western North Carolina at the time, would not learn of the death for many months.
Chapter 10
“I LONG TO SEE CAPTAIN LEWIS”
ALONG LOWER BROADWAY, ROWS OF LOMBARDY POPLARS SHOT high into the air like a grand fountain in a royal garden. Lombardy poplars also lined the old park on Broadway just north of St. Paul’s, where the new City Hall was still under construction. William Hamilton of The Woodlands had introduced the Lombardy poplar (Populus dilatata, today known as Populus nigra) to North America in the 1780s, and it had quickly become a favored tree for ornamenting city streets.
In June 1806, New York’s Lombardy poplars erupted in ashy-brown caterpillars with forked tails. The caterpillars crawled over the tree trunks and dropped on pedestrians strolling along the sidewalks, as well as on passengers riding in open carriages. The insects spewed a poisonous-looking green oil that inflicted severe pain. Mitchill immediately ran an article in the Medical Repository trying to dispel the “general panic” that was racing through the city as New Yorkers informed one another that this “asp” was “one of the most poisonous of all reptiles” and that people were dying from the encounters. (If the reports of fatalities were accurate, the cause may have been an anaphylactic reaction to the poison in the insect’s tiny spines.) In Philadelphia, too, the poplar caterpillars were causing terror. Several men conducted an experiment on a young cat; it sniffed at the worm they placed before it, was stung in the nose, and died forty-five minutes later, after suffering “violent internal pains.” The men then took some of the caterpillars to Peale for his natural history museum. In Washington, a friend of President Jefferson sent him two specimens he had plucked from a Lombardy poplar, explaining that “as this subject has lately excited some speculation, I supposed it would be gratifying to you to observe the worm particularly.”
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