Beyond an Apple a Day (Biology Today) (Report‪)‬

In my last column, I discussed herbaria and my newfound interest in them (Flannery, 2011). Even though this month's theme is human health, I'm not ready to leave my new love yet, and I think I can justify sticking with the topic, at least peripherally After all, it was human health that for centuries drove the study of plants, and to a certain extent it still does, as botanists travel the world seeking plants with medicinal properties. The first herbaria were tied to medical schools. Helen Hewson (1999) noted that botanical illustration, botanical gardens, and herbaria all developed at about the same time in the mid-16th century and all met the need of helping botanists compare species from different localities. As printed tomes on medicine became available, there was the concomitant need to ensure that two authors were talking about the same plant. Nomenclature had yet to be regularized, so drawings, dried specimens, and growing plants were a big help in identifying species. But drawings didn't become useful until the publication of the first great printed and illustrated herbals of Brunfels in 1530 and Fuchs in 1542 (Arber, 1912). The first botanical garden was established in Pisa in 1544 by Luca Ghini, who is also credited with creating the first herbarium of pressed plants and with founding the second botanical garden at Padua in 1545. So the mid-16th century was a very exciting time for botany--and for medicine. Anatomy and botany were the two major areas of study in medical schools of that time, and it was at Padua in 1544 that Vesalius published his On the Fabric of the Body, with the amazing illustrations that are still reproduced so frequently today Anatomy aided in understanding what was going on inside the body, and botany aided in a more practical way: providing chemicals that would help right what was wrong in the body.