American medical botany

American medical botany

Etchings (prints)

Bigelow, Jacob, 1786-1879

Materia medica

Botany, Medical

Ginseng

In addition to being a detailed examination of plants native to the United States with their medicinal uses, American medical botany is the first publication in this country to employ a color printing process for its plates, using an innovative etched stone process. Jacob Bigelow, Harvard's professor of materia medica, hoped to decrease reliance on foreign imported medicinal substances by substitution of domestic compounds: "Several departments of the Materia Medica may be amply supplied from our own forests and meadows, although there are others, for which we must as yet depend on foreign countries. We have yet to discover our anodynes and our emetics.... A great number of foreign drugs, such as gentian, columbo, chamomile, kino, catechu, cascarilla, canella, &c. for which we pay a large annual tax to other countries, might in all probability be superceded by the indigenous products of our own." The plate displayed shows panax quinquefolium [ginseng].

Colored etching showing the ginseng plant, panax quinquefolium, from Jacob Bigelow's American medical botany

Bigelow, Jacob, 1786-1879

Cummings and Hilliard

1817

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Warren Library of the Harvard Medical Library (1.Mw.1817.B)

image

1 colored etching

still image

Received in exchange from the University of Vermont by the Harvard Medical School Library, 1940