864 



attached to the most important medicinal plants. The subject, as 

 yet, is almost in embryo, and much light will be thrown upon it by 

 the investigations of our future medical botanists. 



It is to the researches of regular scientific physicians, that much 

 is to be expected in this department of our profession. The self- 

 styled botanic physicians, who make pretensions to the exclusive use 

 of vegetables, in their empiric practice, employ but few articles in 

 comparison with educated physicians, and with the exception of their 

 divine lobelia, one of the most poisonous substances known in the 

 vegetable or mineral kingdoms, their remedies are generally very 

 inert. Nearly all the knowledge which they ever obtained of them, 

 has been from the writings of regular physicians, and from our 

 standard works upon Medical Botany and Materia Medica. We 

 have no hopes that our vegetable materia medica will receive any 

 valuable accessions from them. I have seen but in a very few of 

 their writings, even a scientific botanical description of any of their 

 boasted remedies, or even a reference to the natural orders of Jussieu 

 or Lindley, or of the sexual system of Linnaeus. The English or 

 vulgar name generally is only given, which may mean one thing, or 

 may mean another, but generally ends only in jargon and confu- 

 sion, for the same English name often applies to a dozen different 

 plants. 



The only extensive early writer upon the medicinal plants of Mas- 

 sachusetts, which I recollect to have seen, was Dr. Cutler, who pub- 

 lished an elaborate article upon the subject, in the Transactions of 

 the American Academy of Arts, Boston, not far from the year 1790. 

 The work is not now before me, and I may not be exactly correct in 

 relation to the date. Separate monographs, or papers, have been 

 published in the medical journals upon individual medicinal plants, 

 but no regular system of botany was published in this section of the 

 country, as far as I can ascertain, till some time after the commence- 

 ment of the present century, when Waterhouse published his Bota- 

 nist. Eaton published his Botany of the Northern States, not far 

 from the year 1812 or 1814. He described almost all the plants 

 then known in the northern part of our Union, according to the 

 Linnsean scheme, with a reference to their natural orders. He 

 speaks of the medicinal properties of all the plants which he de- 

 scribes, by referring them to the classes of Linnaeus, and to his ob- 

 servation " that plants in the same class and order possess the same 

 medicinal properties." If this observation is correct, then all plants 

 are medicinal, and the poisonous hemlock possesses similar proper- 



