Alexander Garden (1728-1793): colonial botanist.

Abstract

"BOTANY, required in the eighteenth-century medical curriculum, became a major avocation of many physicians. The first Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford was an eighteenth-century physician, and the Regius Professor of Botany at Paris in the early 1700's was a doctor of medicine.1 The two most prominent physicians of the European continent of the eighteenth century — Boerhaave and Haller — made extensive and significant contributions to botany. To the physicians, William Withering, Erasmus Darwin and Jean Baptiste Lamarck, eighteenth-century botany also owed a debt. Carl Linnaeus, physician turned botanist, who named and described over 8000 plants, was the hub . . .