Great Cordials

Natural History, May, 1999 by Michelle Anastasia, Rachel Booth

The American Museum of Natural History displays a wide spectrum of plants in its dioramas, which contain lifelike reproductions based on specimens gathered during field expeditions. Yet many of the Museum's most important and beautiful botanical representations can be found in the pages of the library's rare books. While only about fifty of the six thousand rare books in the collection are devoted to plants, many of these efforts at describing and cataloguing botanical specimens are visual and historical gems.

One such book is William Salmon's Compleat English Physician (1693). The author, a physician and something of a mountebank, expounds upon "the particulars of which medicines at this day are composed and made ... as they are applicable to the whole art of physick." Crocus sativus, or saffron, for example, is deemed "one of the greatest cordials in the world, good against fainting and swooning fits.... It cures asthmas, and is a singular antidote against the plague, and all sorts of poyson."

Pictures of flowering plants abound in Figures of the most beautiful, useful and uncommon plants (1809), a two-volume, three-hundred-plate book by Scottish botanist Philip Miller, who attempted to catalog all known genera of English plants. Miller (1691-1771) was hired to tend Chelsea Garden--the nucleus of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew--by physician and naturalist Hans Sloane. (Later, Sloane would head the Royal Society, and his natural history collections would form the basis of the British Museum.) By the time Miller died, he had named more than five thousand species under cultivation. He was also the first to conduct experiments showing that insects aid in flower pollination.

A Himalayan variant of the saffron crocus (Crocus sativus `Cashmirianus') appears in J. Forbes Royle's Illustrations of the botany, and other branches of the natural history of the Himalayan Mountains, and of the flora of Cashmere (1839). Royle (1799-1858) joined the East India Company's medical staff and superintended a garden in northern India. He employed collectors to gather plants and medicines and recommended cinchona plants as a source of quinine to treat malaria.

The Museum's rare books were originally intended for scientific study and documentation, but many have also come to be appreciated for their exquisite artistry. Visitors may peruse the library's collections by appointment.

Michelle Anastasia and Rachel Booth are research librarians at the American Museum of Natural History.