The Doctor’s Garden

Medical practice of this period was rapidly evolving—not unlike today, as new discoveries routinely displace old techniques. Hosack was one of those doctors making advances beyond the bloodletting that prevailed as a cure, as when he dramatically saved the life of Alexander Hamilton’s son Philip by immersing him in a hot bath laced with Peruvian bark powder to increase his body temperature so he could fight an infection.

Hosack had developed his passion for medicine early, as a classics student at the newly renamed Columbia College (King’s College under British rule). He apprenticed himself to a former military surgeon to learn anatomy through autopsies, a controversial practice that led eventually to local riots. Hosack left New York to complete his undergraduate studies at the College of New Jersey (today’s Princeton) and distinguished himself at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in Philadelphia.

Having defeated, through self-discipline, an inclination to depression, Hosack became a doctor bent on saving lives by experimenting with new techniques and medications, particularly in times of urban epidemics. He noticed that the best doctors he knew had studied at the University of Edinburgh, at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment, and so in 1792, just around the time of his 23rd birthday, he set sail for Scotland to advance his education, leaving behind his young wife and infant son. On his way from Liverpool to Edinburgh he visited family friends and “found himself sipping hot toddy by a cozy fire as a young Scotsman named Robert Burns sang odes to the beautiful land where Hosack’s own father had been born.”

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The epiphany that changed his life happened during a casual visit to a professor’s garden outside Edinburgh. As Hosack listened to colleagues and other students discuss the plants around them, he faced his own ignorance on the subject and realized, as Johnson writes, “Botanical expertise . . . flowed in British veins.” Hearing his colleagues contemplate centuries-old knowledge of the “curative properties of plants,” Hosack was introduced to the study of medical botany—“how to use plants to make medicine.” Hitherto, though he had known of plant-based medicines, it was only as ready-made supplies purchased from a druggist or apothecary; now he learned firsthand about the specific applications of various plants.

“Eighteenth-century Britain was a land obsessed with plants,” Johnson writes, a kingdom “covered in gardens,” of which London was “the botanical capital of the Western world.” Hosack determined to go to London next, but not before he visited his father’s handsomely arcaded native city of Elgin on the northern coast. There he met his uncles and resided with a Scottish laird, who, as chance would have it, was an ardent botanist and horticulturist.

Hosack completed his transformation to physician-botanist in London. He had been referred to the eminent botanist and author William Curtis, who for several years had taught and researched at the Society of Apothecaries’ Chelsea Physic Garden (my own perennial haunt for teatime walkabouts near the Thames). Curtis himself had founded the Brompton Botanic Garden, which featured medicinal specimens arranged according to the Linnaean classification.

Curtis took on Hosack as a student, and they made daily rounds through garden beds set apart by rows of Lombardy poplars; they also studied agricultural crops, following Curtis’s belief that farming practices were, as Johnson puts it, “every bit as vital to a great nation as military prowess and cultural achievements.” Curtis instructed Hosack and others on how to botanize in the wild and directed his students to press, dry, and label collected specimens to begin their own herbaria.

Hosack meanwhile continued his studies in anatomy and surgery at a private medical school in London and, thanks to Curtis, was introduced as a foreign member into the elite Linnean Society of London, which had been founded to protect Linnaeus’s vast collection of some 15,000 herbarium sheets, purchased from the scientist’s estate. The young doctor studied this international treasure trove—which included native American specimens that he could have seen on his own walks in the New York countryside. When he left for America after two years away, he was given a set of doubles from this rare collection.

On his return, he went into private practice as a junior partner with Dr. Samuel Bard, George Washington’s former physician, and also secured a position as professor of botany and medicine at Columbia’s medical school, where he taught in a greatly admired, animated style. He also joined the staff of New York Hospital. Sadly, not only did his first child die while he was overseas, but in 1796, his wife died while giving birth to their second child, who also died. Hosack remarried and, over the years, having lost four altogether, had seven surviving children.

During the period of the great constitutional clash between Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists, who supported a strong national government, and Thomas Jefferson’s opposition contingent, both men became entwined in Hosack’s endeavors. Johnson threads together long biographical passages and anecdotes about these and other figures, following their fortunes and misfortunes as they aged with Hosack. Her technique of suddenly moving from one person to another within sections of the same chapter creates the vivid illusion of living in that bustling time and walking among these individuals in the narrow streets of early New York.

Not only was Hamilton one of Hosack’s associates, but so was Aaron Burr. Hosack was both men’s personal doctor and was asked by each to attend their duel in Weehawken, New Jersey. He rowed back across the Hudson River with the wounded Hamilton and remained at his bedside until his death, as he had earlier done with Philip Hamilton—the Hamilton son he once had saved—following Philip’s own fatal duel.

In general, though, David Hosack eschewed politics himself. He had another mission. As Johnson writes:

True, outside Philadelphia on the Schuylkill River, the Bartram family had a collection of plants, including those for medicinal and agricultural purposes, and had long been involved in shipping plants abroad. But what Hosack had in mind was an academic rather than a commercial venture—a public garden “destined to become an irresistible draw for young American doctors and naturalists, a place where they could study specimens of the whole planet’s flora and experiment with medicines and crops.”

Having witnessed the support such institutions received in Great Britain, Hosack had every reason to believe that sponsorship could be found in America. First he approached Columbia, hoping to continue the tradition of the university botanical gardens that went back to Pisa and Padua, but the school couldn’t afford the cost. Next he approached the New York state legislature; a proposal never got past the committee stage.

Impatient to begin, in 1801, at age 32, Hosack struck out to finance the garden on his own. He purchased acreage from the Corporation of the City of New York amidst farmland along the Middle Road that bisected Manhattan. “From a rocky bluff on the western edge of his new property, Hosack reveled in his sweeping views,” Johnson writes. He “loved that he could see both rivers”—the Hudson and the East River—“from his property, but it was the earth beneath his feet that thrilled him most: his Manhattan in miniature, with its glacial rocks, its green fields, its moist bottom-lands.”

Granted he had from his British mentors a specific vision for how a botanical garden should be designed and managed, but the wonder of the story is his mastery of all the practicalities of actually building and planting it from scratch. On an elevation, he constructed a majestic complex: a 20-foot-high, 60-foot-long conservatory with seven tall, arched windows along the façade and, on either side, low 60-foot-long glass hothouses for exotic plants. He also created an arboretum—and included Lombardy poplars, recalling his days at the Brompton garden. Hosack employed “recent immigrants and out-of-work native New Yorkers,” and he trained two of his nephews to become botanists and plant collectors. He named his awe-inspiring creation the Elgin Botanic Garden, after his father’s native city.

Johnson gives us glimpses of Hosack walking in the garden with students and visitors both domestic and foreign—including official botanists from Napoleonic France. By 1806, when he compiled a catalogue for circulation, he was growing more than 250 species native to New York and over 1,400 exotic species. He did all this while still treating patients, initiating new surgeries, and teaching medical students.

Hosack’s influence on American botany and medicine was enormous; reading Johnson, one gets the impression that all of America was botanizing. But operating the garden was a financial struggle, and Hosack went deeply into debt. In 1810, after its initial refusal, the state legislature finally agreed to purchase the Elgin Botanic Garden through a public lottery. Earlier, a committee had cited its importance as “the first establishment of the kind ever attempted in the United States.” Nevertheless, realizing the difficulty of maintaining the garden at the level of, say, the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, the state transferred the garden to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, which decided to lease the garden to raise funds—the first step toward its eventual total dismantlement. For me, the most heartbreaking moment comes on a day in October 1812 when, after surveying the Elgin property, men return to place marble slabs numbering 47 through 51 along the Middle Road with the single number 5 on another side—the first laying out of the grid system of streets and avenues in the area, predicting the garden’s eventual demise as the city expanded northward and the Middle Road became Fifth Avenue.

The state eventually transferred the garden to Columbia, and Hosack finally—after seven years of waiting—received purchase funds. In the years after his 1835 death, it was tremendously lucrative for Columbia to sell and lease plots of the Elgin land to developers, as it became some of the most desired real estate in the world. By the 1920s, the Metropolitan Opera came knocking for Elgin property through its emissary, its stockholder John D. Rockefeller Jr., but then JDR Jr. had another idea: to lease 11 acres from Columbia for a new urban complex. Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia’s revered president, wanted him to know that the land’s “history reads like a romance.” On November 1, 1939, at the opening of Rockefeller Center on the site, Butler noted that, as Johnson puts it, “it was thanks in part to a visionary American doctor that they were all gathered here.”

Though Hosack had tried to recover the garden and suffered with its demise, he remained productive in New York cultural life in other ways. He was a cofounder of societies like the New-York Horticultural Society and the New-York Historical Society and was active in cultural organizations under the umbrella of the New-York Institution, an organization devoted to the fine arts, natural history, and literature and philosophy. And the British did not forget him; he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. After his second wife succumbed to a long, painful illness, he married a wealthy widow with her own big family and they purchased a house upstate on the Hudson River that became famous for its elaborate landscaped gardens. He consoled himself for his loss of Elgin by purchasing from his friend Thomas Cole what became one of the artist’s landmark paintings, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

I could not resist a visit to the New York Botanical Garden’s library to view Hosack’s herbarium sheet of a persimmon tree labeled “Diospyros virginiana Elgin Garden 1829,” a specimen gathered from his ruined garden—a direct contact with him. (Johnson briefly discusses how the NYBG came into existence as an outgrowth of a botanical club founded by one of Hosack’s prize students.)

After reading Johnson’s description of a plaque honoring Hosack in Rockefeller Center’s Channel Gardens, I hastened to wade through the crowds on a hot summer Sunday to search for it. All the big shiny plaques relate to JDR Jr. or the center itself, so at first I was at a loss. I reread her passage, which says the plaque hangs “facing toward the old Middle Road” (that is, Fifth Avenue). I made my rounds once more. Finally, there on a low garden retaining wall that encloses a dolphin fountain and flower beds, so low I had to get on my hands and knees to read it, was the plaque with the words she quotes:

I whipped out my notebook to write down the final lines of the plaque, which Johnson omits:

That dedication encapsulates a lifetime, with many years spent pursuing and a decade spent realizing a magnificent and useful vision. Victoria Johnson conveys Hosack’s story with such detail that readers will feel like onlookers during those adventurous days that gave rise to so many institutions we still know. The time has come to raise the plaque and burnish it.