Walking the swards: medical education and the rise and spread of the botanical field class

Abstract

Physic gardens expressly for teaching medical students to recognise herbs in the living state originated in northern Italy in 1543 and became a facility to which Europe's leading universities increasingly aspired. In default of one, the practice arose of taking students into the countryside instead; but that depended on there being a teacher who was also a keen field botanist. In the seventeenth century Paris, London and Edinburgh replaced Montpellier and Basle as the principal centres of this more informal approach, which eventually had one or two commercial imitators as well. When stricter qualifications governing medical practice in Britain induced a great expansion of medical schools there after 1815 student excursions were taken in Scotland to new heights of popularity and ambitiousness. Having originated in a need to protect future practitioners from being duped by their suppliers, field classes ended up by generating the publication of floras, a market for botanical collecting equipment and, above all, a simpler model for local associations of naturalists which liberated them from an inherited organisational straitjacket.