THE REVIVAL OP BOTANY 13 



the treatment of diseases by the plants of the country- 

 was held to be so efficacious, it is no wonder that botany 

 should have been in high esteem. Every physician 

 professed to be a botanist, and every botanist was 

 supposed to be qualified for medical practice. For 

 example, all the botanists who are named in this chapter 

 practised medicine, except Clusius, whose modern bio- 

 grapher, Morren, notes it as a singular circumstance 

 that he was not a physician. The alliance of botany 

 with medicine provided a livelihood to many a student 

 of plants, brought hearers to his lectures, and helped 

 to sell his books, but it forced him to make pharmacy 

 his main theme. This would have been retarding under 

 any circumstances, all the more when the pharmacy was 

 wholly unscientific, relying simply upon the dicta of 

 ancient and ill-understood authors.^ 



Before discussing the writings of the botanical re- 

 formers it will be useful to glance at those which they 

 sought to replace. About the year 1500 the treatises 

 which most nearly answered to the herbals of a later 

 time professed to indicate remedies for all known 

 diseases, and to trace drugs to their sources. Well-known 

 animals and minerals were added, sometimes on very 

 slight grounds, to the plants which yielded the bulk of 

 the remedies, so that the handbook of medicine became 

 an encyclopaedia of natural history. The most widely 

 circulated of these books was the Ortus {Hortus) Sani- 

 tatis, called in German the Gart der Gesundheit, which 

 had been written in Germany before the invention of 

 printing. The original was in Latin, and addressed to 



' Until our own times the dissecting-room and the lectures of the medical 

 school furnished the only regular training for the naturalist, while he found in 

 the medical profession the likeliest means of earning his bread. Baer and 

 many other nineteenth century naturalists were thus compelled to study 

 medicine. 



