Botanical Books, Taxonomy, and the Art of Georgia O'Keeffe.

Abstract

Botany is a field that seamlessly merges science with art. On the one hand, the science of botany has long been associated with botanical illustration. On the other, flowers have been a major source of artists' inspiration. They remain the subject of countless metaphors and embellish rituals in cultures across the globe. For centuries, knowledge of plants was fundamental to the practice of medicine. Botany was at the very roots of pharmacology. A pupil of Aristotle, Theophrastus (ca 370-ca 286 BC) is regarded as its father. In ancient Rome, a Greek physician, Dioscorides, wrote a treatise entitled De Materia Medica , which combined what we would today call botany and pharmacology. It was written in Greek and was later translated into Latin and Arabic. A copy of it known as Codex Vindobonensis is the earliest example of an illustrated botanical book (1). Then there is the much broader in scope work by Pliny the Elder: Naturalis Historia, completed in 77 AD. It consists of 37 books, 7 of them containing information about medicinal plants. Information about the medical significance of plants is …