American Eden Read online

  For my parents, who love cities and gardens,

  and for Rebecca, who tended this garden

  Picture a sea dotted with sails, a lovely sweep of notched shoreline, blossoming trees on greensward sloping down to the water, a multitude of small, artfully embellished candy-box houses in the background. . . .

  —ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE,

  NEW YORK CITY,

  MAY 1831

  CONTENTS

  To the Reader

  Prologue

  . . .

  Chapter 1.“TEAR IN PIECES THE DOCTORS”

  Chapter 2.“AN ENDLESS SOURCE OF INNOCENT DELIGHT”

  Chapter 3.“RIPPING OPEN MY BELLY”

  Chapter 4.“HE IS AS GOOD AS THE THEATRE”

  Chapter 5.“THE GRASS IS THREE FEET HIGH IN THE STREETS”

  Chapter 6.“DOCTOR, I DESPAIR”

  Chapter 7.“THERE ARE NO INFORMED PEOPLE HERE”

  Chapter 8.“H—K IS ENOUGH, AND EVEN THAT UNNECESSARY”

  Chapter 9.“THIS DELICIOUS BANQUET”

  Chapter 10.“I LONG TO SEE CAPTAIN LEWIS”

  Chapter 11.“STRANGE NOISES, LOW SPIRITS”

  Chapter 12.“SUCH A PIECE OF DOWNRIGHT IMPOSTURE”

  Chapter 13.“YOU KNOW, BETTER THAN ANY MAN”

  Chapter 14.“INSTEAD OF CREEPING ALONG THE EARTH”

  Chapter 15.“YOUR FORTUNATE CITY”

  Chapter 16.“EXPULSION FROM THE GARDEN OF EDEN”

  Chapter 17.“LIKE A ROMANCE”

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Sources and Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  TO THE READER

  DAVID HOSACK’S LAST NAME, WHICH IS OF SCOTTISH ORIGIN, was pronounced “Hozzick” by his contemporaries. The Elgin Botanic Garden was named for the town of Elgin, Scotland, and was pronounced “EL-ghin.” I have preserved the original spelling and grammar of every person whose words I quote in this book, unless otherwise noted. Any emotions or opinions I attribute to them come from their own writings.

  During Hosack’s lifetime, many of the plants of North America had not yet been identified or named by naturalists, so he sometimes drew on the European names of related species as he tried to identify his specimens. The scientific term for nonnative plants used by many botanists, both past and present, is exotic. I have generally preserved the names used by Hosack and his botanical associates for each plant mentioned in this book. Current names for a selection of these plants can be found at americaneden.org.

  I discuss many remedies Hosack and his colleagues used in their medical practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but this book is in no way intended as a treatment guide.

  AMERICAN EDEN

  PROLOGUE

  SEPTEMBER 1797. THE BOY WOULD BE DEAD BEFORE DAWN. He was fifteen, more handsome already than his famously handsome father, who had turned back toward New York City when he received the news. At best, the boy’s father would arrive in time to hold his son’s hand as the end came. At worst, he would arrive only in time to embrace his grieving wife. The young doctor in attendance had already sent her out of the death chamber.

  The doctor was solidly built, neither tall nor short, with thick black hair that crowned a massive head. People often noticed his sonorous voice and his piercing eyes, which were so dark as to appear completely black. He carried himself with a trace of arrogance—at least his rivals thought so. Friends detected in his ramrod bearing only boundless energy and sound principles. He was a man built to take command of a sickroom, or a funeral procession.

  The doctor’s name was David Hosack, and he was just twenty-eight years old. He knew that his more experienced medical colleagues would try to bring down the fever—was it typhus? scarlatina?—with cold cloths pressed to the skin. But that measure had already proved useless. As the boy’s father raced home, Hosack took one last, risky gamble. He chose heat instead of cold, drawing a steaming bath and mixing a botanical remedy into the water—a bitter powder called Peruvian bark, made from the cinchona tree, native to the Andes. The bark, which was later discovered to contain quinine, had been used for centuries by the Quechua people to cure malaria before the Jesuits imported it to Europe in the 1630s. It had become a staple medicine first for European doctors and then for American ones, and although it was used far more often for malaria, Hosack hoped against hope that it would bring down the fever. Next he poured several bottles of alcohol into the bathwater to stimulate the circulation. After the boy had been lowered in, he sprinkled in smelling salts. At first, the thin body lay still in the steaming water, but within minutes, the boy began to regain his senses and his pulse quickened. Hosack swaddled him in warm blankets and carried him back to the bed, where he slept deeply for several hours before awaking—delirious once again. The doctor prepared another bath, and then another. The fever slowly receded. The boy would survive.

  Hosack refused to leave the house that night, but he permitted himself to doze in a nearby bedroom after the hours of anxious effort. As he later recalled the scene, he bolted awake to find the boy’s father, Alexander Hamilton, at his bedside. Taking Hosack’s hand, Hamilton said with tears in his eyes that he could not remain one moment longer in his own house without expressing his deepest gratitude. In that moment, Hosack became a trusted friend to one of the nation’s most famous and powerful men. But his medical intuition that night did more than forge a bond between a Founding Father and a young physician. It moved him one step closer to an idea he had quietly been nursing for three years. A few weeks after saving Hamilton’s son Philip, Hosack picked up a quill and composed a letter to the president and trustees of Columbia College, where he was a professor of medicine and botany.

  He meant with his letter to move the earth. It would take time, years of patience etched into twenty acres as his fellow New Yorkers showered him with both accolades and scorn. Finally orchards would arise, of apple, pear, and apricot. Carnations and daffodils would dot the lawns. Medicinal plants—poppies, chamomile, feverfew, ginseng, and dozens more—would grow in tidy plots and along shaded walkways. A glass edifice nearly two hundred feet long would stretch across the land, a magnificent conservatory to shelter the plants of the world’s deserts and jungles from icy New York winters. Hosack would gather into his island Eden more than two thousand species of plants, collected from correspondents around the globe and from the farms next door.

  It was an American triumph: the first botanical garden founded for the new nation.

  Because of his garden, Hosack became one of the most famous Americans of his time. His medical research there cemented his reputation as the most innovative physician in New York. When Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr needed an attending physician for their 1804 duel, they both chose David Hosack. Thomas Jefferson, Alexander von Humboldt, and Sir Joseph Banks sent Hosack plants and seeds for his garden and lavished praise on him. When the sixty-six-year-old Hosack suffered a stroke in 1835, newspapers from South Carolina to New Hampshire ran bulletins about his illness and offered prayers for his recovery. Even before this, he had been immortalized in paintings, in marble busts, on commemorative coins, and in the names of plant species. Some Europeans called him the Sir Joseph Banks of America. It was the highest honor imaginable for an American scientist.

  HOSACK WAS BORN IN 1769 and grew up under the British occupation of New York City during the Revolutionary War. He came of age just when the newly independent nation was most in need of his energy, intellect, and prodigious talent for organizing other people. The Founding Fathers had secured American independence and framed a new government. Now it fell to Hosack’s generation to build the civic institutions that would guarantee the future health and prosperity of the
Republic. Hosack devoted himself to this challenge his whole adult life.

  Hosack was a complex figure. Although he relished family life and was affectionate with his many children, he pursued endless civic causes that tore him away from home. He loved remarking that the more a man took on, the more he accomplished every day. He slept as little as possible, avoided alcohol, and flirted with vegetarianism. He could be fiercely competitive one moment and generous the next. He cared deeply about his fellow Americans and spent his entire life trying to help them, but he could also be vain and snobbish. As a young doctor, he enjoyed warm relationships with several eminent mentors who loved him like a son, yet he didn’t hesitate to break publicly with their antiquated medical theories—for which they forgave him.

  Hosack devoted his life to bettering his nation, but he insisted on staying out of party politics, even when his friends tried to persuade him to run for office. He believed being a good doctor depended on neutrality. He enjoyed lifelong friendships with famous men who admired him while hating one another. He revered Alexander Hamilton and was shattered by his death in the 1804 duel. But Hosack was so close to Aaron Burr that after the duel he remained in touch with Burr throughout the years of his disgrace and exile. Hosack even sent one of his younger brothers, William Hosack, to Europe as Burr’s traveling companion. While they were abroad, Hosack cared for Burr’s adored daughter, Theodosia, during a terrible illness, keeping her father apprised of her condition in frequent letters.

  Hosack’s twin passions were medicine and nature. He was fascinated by the human body and saw it as an unknown country whose mysterious terrain called for intrepid new explorers. As a young medical student he risked his life to defend the controversial practice of corpse dissection because he knew it was the best chance doctors had to understand the diseases that killed Americans in droves every year. He became a mesmerizing public speaker and one of the most beloved medical professors in the United States, drawing crowds of students who hung on his every word and wrote down even his jokes in their notebooks. He performed surgeries never before documented on American soil and advocated smallpox vaccination at a time when many people were terrified of the idea. He pioneered the use of the stethoscope in the United States shortly after its invention in France in 1816. He published one innovative medical study after another—on breast cancer, anthrax, tetanus, obstetrics, the care of surgical wounds, and dozens of other subjects. In the early twentieth century, a medical journal paid tribute to Hosack’s many contributions by noting that “there is perhaps no one person in the nineteenth century to whom New York medicine is more deeply or widely indebted than to this learned, faithful, generous, liberal man.”

  Yet although Hosack found surgery vital and exciting, he was convinced that saving lives also depended on knowing the natural world outside the human body. As a young man, he studied medicine and botany in Great Britain, and he returned to the United States convinced that it was at their intersection that Americans would find the most promising new treatments for the diseases that regularly swept the country. Hosack talked and wrote constantly about the natural riches that covered the unexplored North American continent. The health of the young nation, he argued, would depend on the health of its citizens, and thus on the skill of its doctors in using plants to prevent and treat illness. The political strength of the young nation would depend on its self-sufficiency, and thus on the ability of its farmers to select and raise the hardiest and most nourishing crops. The dignity of the young nation would depend on showing haughty Europe that the New World was abundantly blessed with natural wealth and scientific talent.

  After the night he saved Philip Hamilton’s life with the help of a medicinal plant—Peruvian bark—Hosack spent every spare second launching the new nation’s first botanical garden. He lobbied friends, colleagues, and politicians for the financial support he needed to buy land, build greenhouses, hire gardeners, and collect plants from all over the continent and the world. Many people around him could not grasp what he was trying to do. Some mocked him publicly. He founded the garden anyway, at great expense to himself, eventually spending on it more than a million in today’s dollars. He named his garden the Elgin Botanic Garden, after his father’s hometown of Elgin, Scotland. Over the next decade, he assembled a collection of plants so diverse that his species lists make some of the most accomplished American botanists today shake their heads in amazement.

  Many people now think of a botanical garden above all as a beautiful place to spend a day, but Hosack was driven by a much more urgent mission. All around him adults and children were dying of diseases whose causes no one knew—yellow fever, scarlet fever, typhus, consumption, and others. The role of microbes in these diseases would not be discovered until the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth. When Hosack was a young man at the end of the eighteenth century, doctors relied on explanations for health and illness that made sense in their current frameworks. They argued about spasms of the nervous system, excessive blood in the circulatory system, jammed digestive tracts, and poisonous gases emanating from swamps near towns. They shared anecdotal case notes about their patients, but these couldn’t possibly amount to a clear picture of the patterns and causes of illness and mortality. Close inspections of damaged organs and tissues through autopsies were one way doctors tried to discern how diseases executed their deadly work—the word autopsy means “see for oneself”—yet corpse dissections horrified many of Hosack’s contemporaries. Sometimes available medicines and surgeries helped sick patients, but they often failed to stop the progress of a disease—or they even accelerated death. The discovery of new medicines was a scattershot process of trial and error.

  David Hosack, with his botanical garden in the distance

  The Elgin Botanic Garden was Hosack’s brilliant answer to this desperate situation. Most of the medicines familiar to late-eighteenth-century doctors came from the plant world. There were hundreds of plant-based medicines known to European doctors and many more in use among native peoples around the world. Peruvian bark was the most effective such drug so far in use among eighteenth-century doctors, but it was also scarce and expensive to import. Hosack grasped with more clarity and energy than anyone else that if the United States didn’t begin to grow and test plants from around the world, American medicine was doomed to chronic chaos. He announced the creation of his garden and began to collect thousands of specimens. He used his Elgin collections to conduct and supervise some of the earliest systematic research in the United States on the chemical properties of medicinal plants. He grew poppies to study opiates. He grew willow and spiraea, two species with painkilling and anti-inflammatory elements that would be combined into a new drug called aspirin at the dawn of the twentieth century. He experimented with medicinal plants from the tropics in his Manhattan greenhouse—for example, Madagascar periwinkle, an extract of which is now used to make anticancer drugs.

  Surrounded by piles of plants and boiling pots filled with leaves, bark, and flowers, Hosack and his students isolated and compared the chemical properties of exotic and native plants as they sought to create a cheap local supply of plant-based drugs. As new waves of disease broke out around them, they used what they were learning to modify traditional treatment protocols and to understand more about the effects of specific medicinal plants on the human body. Seen from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the Elgin Botanic Garden has less in common with a beautiful city park than with the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and CRISPR gene-editing laboratories.

  Hosack was shaped by Enlightenment ideals. His elders had fought for self-government, founded hospitals, created a national banking system, experimented with electricity, and planned cities. He grew up surrounded by men and women who had deep faith in the ability of humans to better the world through their rational powers of thought and action. Hosack took this exhilarating idea and applied it to medicine, botany, and agriculture. He did as muc
h as any man of his generation to keep the channels between American and European naturalists open, ensuring a constant influx of novel plant species to the United States along with all the latest information on their properties. Hosack’s reputation grew so great that European scientists—including two of Napoleon’s botanists—came to study with him at Elgin. He sent his own students to study in London and Paris so they would return home prepared to advance American science, just as he had done.

  Working without the aid of germ theory, Hosack made frustrating mistakes and sometimes charged down dead ends as he strove to match drugs to specific diseases. But he was the leading pioneer in this American quest, and the Elgin Botanic Garden was his staging ground. He trained young Americans to ask life-and-death questions about nature and medicine and equipped them with the scientific methods to pursue the answers. He founded one of the nation’s first medical journals to circulate his and others’ research, and he helped build some of the first institutions ever to formulate professional and ethical regulations for American medicine. After Hosack’s death his students—and their students in turn—went on to pioneer in the fields of surgery, etiology, and drug discovery.

  Hosack’s garden helped change how Americans saw the natural world. In 1785, when Hosack was still just an average New York teenager, a French botanist arrived in Manhattan on a mission from King Louis XVI and immediately complained in a letter home, “There are no informed people here, not even amateurs.” At the time few Americans beyond well-heeled gentlemen with country estates and a handful of nurserymen and college professors thought plants were worthy of scientific study. But during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Hosack taught at his garden and wrote with such excitement about the marvelous properties of plants, from the plainest to the showiest, that he helped ignite a craze for botany. Men and women flocked to lectures by Hosack and his students, snapping up the first American botany textbooks and guides to plant collecting in the wild. In 1817, when another French botanist visited New York and met Hosack and his circle, he came to a different conclusion about Americans’ relation to nature: “Truly, this is a land of botanists.”