Author Description

Excerpt from Report on the Indigenous Medical Botany of Massachusetts <p>My object in attending to the study of botany, was to investigate the medical properties of such plants as we might discover in our peregrinations and wanderings. The field had been but partially explored, and many of our plants, in the language of the immortal Rush, were exhaling their virtues in the desert air. After my marriage, in 1818, to Miss Harriet T. Goodhue, I was greatly as sisted by my wife, who drew and painted most of the plants painted by Mrs. Hitchcock, besides very many others from nature, and from other sources. In subsequent years, this collection of paintings has been very much enlarged by my daughter Helen Maria (now Mrs. Huntington), and my younger daughter, Caroline Willard. The paintings now in my possession, principally of medical plants, from these and other sources, amount to several hundred, which, to me at least, are invaluable, and they have been of great service to me in my lectures on medical botany at Dartmouth Medical College, and upon materia medica in the Willoughby University of Ohio. This, in my Opinion, is the most permanent and beautiful method of pre paring what may be called a fac-simile of an herbarium. There is no danger of the destruction of the paintings from insects, and of the fading of the plants from the ravages of time. I have availed my self, also, of all the limited means in my power, to procure our valu able, and even costly works upon Medical Botany. In this way, I have enriched my library with the Splendid work of W. P. C. Bar ton, with the beautiful plates of Michaux, and many other splendid works. While making my collection of coloured engravings of plants, I have devoted much of my attention to the investigation of the medicinal properties of the plants which have been found in this section of the country; and so long ago as the year 1819, I compiled a volume upon the medical virtues of our plants, culling information from every source