profession is under no kind of regulation. Loud as the call is, to our shame be it remembered, we have no law to protect the lives of the king’s subjects from the malpractice of pretenders. Any man, at his pleasure, sets up for physician, apothecary, and chirurgeon. No candidates are either examined, licensed, or were sworn to fair practice.”[1] This condition of things was also exhibited by Dr. Peter Middleton in his introductory lecture in 1768, upon the opening of the Medical School, who stigmatized a class of practitioners as the “needy outcasts of other places in the character of doctors.”[2]
There is an instinctive tendency among scientific men, when transplanted to new and unexplored localities, to investigate the objects of natural interest to which they are introduced, and none could have been better calculated to arouse curiosity, or lead to exploration, than the surroundings of the colonial physicians. The natural science with which they were best acquainted was botany. It had necessarily entered into their studies as an element of medical education, and was so closely associated with the therapeutical methods of the time, that the transition was an easy and attractive one from the study of the plants to which they had been accustomed to unknown productions everywhere thrust upon their observation.
The rich and resplendent Flora of North America was a subject for wonder and contemplation to the true votary of nature, well calculated to awaken his enthusiasm, irrespective of the practical application that might be made of its study and investigation to the interests of humanity. When Professor Kalm, of Obo, a distinguished naturalist, was sent by the Universities of Sweden and the Government to this country in 1748, he landed in Philadelphia, and thus narrates his impressions: “I found that I was now come into a new world. Wherever I looked to the ground I everywhere found such plants as I had never seen before. When I saw a tree, I was forced to stop and ask those who accompanied me, how it was called. The first plant which struck my eyes was an andropogon, or
