Throwback Thursday: Piecing Together Medical Botany
The “Flower Book” from the Moore Archives is much older (and weirder) than We Thought
Root Cause
While organizing our library, we found a mysterious manilla folder- filled with what looked like a very old book, containing illustrations of plants and their descriptions, whose binding had long since worn away.
The book was in pieces, but we found it with a card dating to 1988, when we think the book was donated.
However, it was fairly easy to identify what this book was, at least on a surface level– because the title page is still intact.
At first glance, it identified itself as The supplement to (Part the second) of Volume III of William Woodville’s Medical Botany. However, troubles began while scanning when we noticed that we had two title pages.
Thus began a deep dive into solving that small mystery, which quickly became much more complicated.
Who’s Who
Firstly, a brief identification of the key players involved.
William Woodville was a Quaker physician best remembered for his work on smallpox.
He served as a doctor at the London Smallpox Hospital, and smallpox was what eventually killed him. He also authored Medical Botany, one of the landmark illustrated herbals of the late 18th and early 19th century.
James Sowerby, the artist who illustrated it, was a natural history illustrator whose engravings and hand-painted plates helped shape how science was visualized for generations.
Why This Book Mattered
Books like Medical Botany did more than collect plants.
They served as tools for physicians, apothecaries, and naturalists who needed accurate depictions to identify species, understand medicinal properties, and compare notes across an increasingly global network.
Woodville issued the first edition between 1790 and 1794 in London, illustrated by Sowerby.
The plates were typically published in black and white so the linework stayed consistent, then hand-painted after the fact.
Later, a second edition appeared in 1810, and a third edition appeared in 1832, edited by William Jackson Hooker with George Spratt contributing.
A Date with Discrepancy
The note for context dates this edition of William Woodville’s Medical Botany to 1874. However, no credible evidence shows a reprint of this book at that time.
We do know that a second edition appeared in 1810.
A third edition appeared in 1832, edited by William Jackson Hooker (with George Spratt contributing).
This gives us a good place to start. The Internet Archive has numerous editions of the volumes scanned and digitized for comparison. We start with the 1832 edition, which can be sourced here.
This looks promising, but we have a few problems.
The number for the plate assigned to the plants does not match our book from the archives.
The coloration of several of the plants also does not match. That is to be expected, since publishers usually issued the book in black and white for consistency, with the colors painted in by hand afterward.
However, our mismatch of plates is especially concerning.
Index Intrigue
This version of the 1832 edition lacks an index, but that has been archived elsewhere.
Checking the index makes the post-1800 date originally assigned to the book in our archives even more dubious.
Not only does the index not match what we have visually, but we also have a notable misprint in our book. Our book says that plate number 230 should belong to the coffee tree (Coffea arabica), but in our book that plate is assigned to Prunus laucoceraus. When we look at the index for the 1832 edition, Prunus laucoceraus is assigned to plate number 185.
Because of this, we have to look elsewhere to provide a date for this edition of the book.
Supplement Sleuthing
We know that it was a supplement to Medical Botany, published with volume 3. We can start looking for indexes of volume three or the supplement that will match that misprint.
We found one scanned into the Internet Archive here.
This edition, from 1794 and published in London, matches both our misprint and the visual appearance of the pages that we have from the book. It has also been scanned in its entirety.
Notably, this “part the second” of volume three only goes up to page 169.
This is concerning, because we have several pages of the same style that occur after that page number.
Though we can match plate numbers with the index to know that it is the right publication, the supplement does not contain several of the loose plates that we found in the back of the book, as well as several plates with written descriptions that we have as well.
For example, Clove Pink is listed as plate 80 in the index, and it is listed as plate 80 in ours as well.
However, searching through the book on the Internet Archive does not show any results for Clove Pink or Plate 80 other than in the index.
We run into a similar problem with a number of the other loose plates, such as Capsicum annuus (spelled with an “f” due to the way English was written at the time).
We can safely surmise that the majority of the book that we have was sourced from this 1794 edition of the supplement to Volume Three of Medical Botany, but we still do not know where the extra pages and illustrated plates come from.
Plate Pursuit
Searching elsewhere with that in mind, starting with volume 3 published in the same date, we were able to find the source of plate 144, the annual capsicum (also known as the guinea pepper).
Clove Pink does not appear in this volume, nor does plate 80.
For this, we had to search and find a complete collection of the 1790–1793 editions, published in London, Printed and sold for the author by James Phillips.
In this edition, we find plate 80 and the matching description for the plant in Volume 2, complete with the “Viola ordata” written at the bottom of the page, indicating what plant came next.
Mystery Plates Solved
Using this method, and now confident that this book was sourced from editions of Woodville’s Medical Botany published in London between 1780 and 1794, we can match the remaining mystery plates to their respective volumes, and even read what the original description for the plates would have been.
The plates in our book that did not come with descriptions are the following:
Plate 130 – Ficus Carica – found to be from volume 2, you can read about it here
Plate 144 – Capsicum annuum – found to be from volume 2 (mentioned above)
Plate 205 – Lichen islandicus – found to be from volume 3, you can read about it here
Plate 214 – Anchusa offinialis – found to be from volume 4, you can read about it here
Plate 215 – Symphytum officinale – found to be from volume 4, you can read about it here
Plate 221 – Antirrhinum Linaria – found to be from volume 4, you can read about it here
Plate 223 – Strychnos Nux vomica – found to be from volume 4, you can read about it here
Plate 224 – Physalis Alkekengi – found to be from volume 4, you can read about it here
Plate 241 – Betonica officinalis – found to be from volume 4, you can read about it here
Plate 243 – Teucrium Chamaedrys – found to be from volume 4, you can read about it here
Plate 257 – Wintera aromatica – found to be from volume 4, you can read about it here
Plate 266 – Phellandrium aquaticum – found to be from volume 4, you can read about it here
Now that we have determined the volumes that our excerpt is sourced from, we can safely surmise that the “published by Dr. Woodville in 1794” at the bottom of each illustration is not merely when the drawing was commissioned and the plates were originally printed (as we originally assumed).
It is a genuine, absolute date for those pages. These descriptions and illustrations come from a first edition of Woodville’s Medical Botany, published in 1794.
Signed, Sealed, (Not Quite) Delivered
This is stunning for a number of reasons.
The sheer age of the book (over 200 years old) is one of them, but it also raises the question: how did so many different pages from different volumes from a book published in London end up being donated to Yellow Springs with a date of 1874?
Though the 1874 date was likely a misunderstanding or was passed down by speculation, we can see that on the inside of the back and front covers of the book are scrawled two names.
On the front cover, someone named Emily has written her name, and she has helpfully included a date of 1878.
Her last name is also there, but it is written in such a way that it is difficult to decipher, “Burett” or “Burnett” is our current best guess. This inscription, judging by the grain of the writing implement, was written in pencil.
Faintly in the opposite corner, someone has recorded a date of October 28, ’39 (likely 1839).
This does not seem to be in the same handwriting as Emily’s signature.
On the back few pages of the book, there is another name, which appears to be much older. From the technique and the grain of the strokes, it is likely that this name was written with a quill dipped in ink.
The name says “Thos J. Barker” (though again, the surname is speculative, due to the difficulty in deciphering what the last bit of the signature says), and this can help us narrow down the date that this name was written in the book.
Handwriting and History
Thos (an abbreviation of Thomas) was an abbreviation that was only popular from the late 18th and 19th century, according to the helpful page on deciphering old handwriting published by the Library of Virginia.
Thomas J. Barker proved to be a fairly difficult person to find while looking through records for the area that are available online, however we did find one promising lead.
On the Pennsylvania Historical Commission website, there are finding guides related to the Underground Railroad, and recorded in this is a letter from Mr. Thomas Barker to his son, Luke, dated in 1820.
The link to that letter can be found here (and in a more stable and direct format here). This letter is recorded in the John Adlum papers, 1794–1816 (MG-13), and references a man named Dr. T[undeciphered].
Interestingly, John Adlum, a surveyor in Pennsylvania, is considered the father of American viticulture, which involves cultivating grapes for wine. He likely knew about herbals and botanical books, including William Woodville’s Medical Botany.
However, without comparing the handwriting in the letter from Mr. Thomas Barker, father of Luke W. Barker, with the signature of Thomas J. Barker in our book from the archives, we cannot safely confirm that they are one and the same.
This connection intrigues us, but for now, we seem to have hit a dead end. Further research into this matter will help us solve this mystery.
The Art of Science
Woodville’s text and Sowerby’s illustrations reflect the era’s dynamic connection between science, art, and medicine.
Physicians depended on books like this for guidance, artists established standards of accuracy through them, and botanists recorded new discoveries within their pages.
This blending of disciplines propelled many discoveries forward.
It’s fitting that this book resides at Historic Yellow Springs, a place recognized for centuries for its focus on nature, medical advancements, and artistic expression.
During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Army built the only purpose-designed military hospital here, where Dr. Bodo Otto inoculated soldiers against smallpox.
To think of Woodville, a physician whose life and death were both shaped by smallpox, and his Medical Botany resting here now creates a poetic circle.
His plates and pages belong in a place where medicine, science, and art have long met in practice and history.
🌼🌷🌹
See more online at: Historic Yellow Springs
Very nice article with great background information.