kind of grass—and grass is a part of botany I always delighted in. I was seized with terror at the thought of ranging through so many new and unknown parts of natural history.”[1] This was an instinctive expression of feeling on the part of one of the most accomplished naturalists of the age. The colonial physicians were not neglectful of resources that lay within their reach. Stimulated by a desire to render themselves independent in the supply of their remedial agents, they made important discoveries in regard to the value of indigenous plants, which have stood the test of experience. By them standard additions were made to the Materia Medica list, not only of this country, but of Europe. Some of the medicinal productions of the continent of America were known to the aborigines.[2] The names of Clayton, Tennant, Lining, Chalmers, Garden, Shoeff, Colden, and Mitchell, may be honorably mentioned in association with the botanical productions of North America; and in compliment to several of them Linnæus named such genera as emanated from their researches. It is stated that Dr. Tennant received one hundred pounds from the Virginia legislature, in 1739, in consequence of the discovery of the efficacy of senega in pleurisy. Dr. Garden’s name is closely connected with the recognition of the anthelmintic properties of Spigelia Marilandica.[3]
- ↑ Kalm’s Travels in North America, vol. i. p. 31.
- ↑ The way in which the resources of the country were viewed by certain persons who wrote upon the subject at an early date, may be judged of from the following extract of Gabriel Thomas’s account of Pennsylvania, published in 1698: “There are also many curious and excellent physical wild herbs, roots, and drugs, of great virtue and very sanative, as the sassafras and sarsaparilla, so much used in diet drinks, for the cure of the venereal disease, which makes the Indians, by a right application of them, as able doctors and surgeons as any in Europe, performing celebrated cures therewith, and by the use of some particular plants only, find remedy in all swellings, burnings, cuts, etc. There grows also in great plenty the black snakeroot (famed for its sometimes preserving from, but often curing the plague, being infused only in whine, brandy, or rumm), rattlesnake root, pokeroot—called, in England, jallop—with several other beneficial herbs, plants, roots, which physicians have approved of, far exceeding in nature and virtue those of other countries.”—Op. cit., p. 18.
- ↑ An interesting lecture upon this subject was published by Professor Wood, introductory to his course of 1840, University of Pennsylvania. See, also, Thatcher’s Medical Biography.
