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American horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus). Anonymous illustrator. From J. De Kay, Zoology of New-York, vol. 5, pt. 6. (Albany, NY, 1843).

On June 20 every year, these ancient beauties of our world get some well-deserved special attention. Those of us lucky enough to encounter a horseshoe crab on a summertime seashore walk are meeting a creature that is more closely related to spiders than true crabs and boasts a lineage stretching 200- to  450 million years back.  The American horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus) lives in shallow waters of the continental shelf along the Atlantic coast of North America. In an annual spectacle that has repeated itself over eons, during the high tides of spring and summer, masses of horseshoe crabs enter intertidal areas along the shore to spawn—an event that ensures the species survival and provides a key food source for shorebirds like the red knot. 

Useful to the fishing industry as bait, and to the pharmaceutical industry, which uses the crab’s blue blood to keep IV drugs and vaccines sterile, horseshoe crabs have been under intense harvesting pressure over the past century. Populations of the American horseshoe crab have declined across its entire native range. In the Delaware Bay, until recently considered a horseshoe crab stronghold, its numbers have crashed by as much as 90%. Adding to this pressure, the intertidal zones so important to horseshoe crab reproduction are likely to be inundated and eroded as polar glaciers melt. L. polyphemus has survived several mass extinction events of Earth’s deep past, yet a 2024 data review by the Center for Biological Diversity assessed that without more targeted protection, chances are high that the already overexploited American horseshoe crab will not survive the changes that global warming will bring to our shorelines.

The good news on that sobering forecast, however: we do know what can and needs to be done to keep horseshoe crabs part of our shoreline ecosystems for future generations to treasure as we do today. International Horseshoe Crab Day is here to remind us of that!

Scanned from volume five of James De Kay's Zoology of New York of 1843, the image above has no clear artist attribution. What we do know is that De Kay’s work is part of an ambitious survey commissioned by the New York State Legislature in 1836 to document the state’s natural resources. Medical-doctor-turned-naturalist James De Kay led the survey’s zoological component and over four years of fieldwork with his team documented approximately 2,300 different animals in New York State. Descriptions and illustrations for 700 of these—many of the latter bearing artistic standards set by the British-born American painter John William Hall, a core member of De Kay’s team—were published as a four-volume set. While the original motivations for the overall survey project were economic, like many of the other publications that emerged from it, De Kay’s Zoology provided a foundational study for understanding New York State’s complex and biologically rich natural environment.

Lorenzo Langstroth, 1890. From Langstroth on the hive & honey bee, rev. by Dadant. 1892.

December 25th, Christmas Day, is a day for sharing and giving. It also happens to be the birthday of a man known as the father of American beekeeping: Lorenzo Langstroth, born Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1810. With both happy occasions in mind, Mann Library is pleased to announce a resource that we’re pretty sure students of beekeeping and its history will find a wonderful gift: a fully digitized, searchable copy of Langstroth’s handwritten personal journal. Where a researcher would have once had to make an in-person trip to our special collections reading room to attempt a deciphering of Langstroth’s (infamously difficult to read) handwriting, the journal is now freely available (and actually readable!) as both a digitized version of the original work and in a transcribed form as part of the online Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Page from "Journal on matters relating to bees, etc.," unpublished manuscript, Lorenzo Langstroth 1852-1895. in the special collections of Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.

For those not yet fully in the know, Lorenzo Langstroth looms large in American beekeeping history thanks to discoveries and inventions he made as a self-taught apiarist, innovations which essentially revolutionized the 19th century practice of beekeeping in North America and facilitated its development into the profitable industry of today. His guide on beekeeping, The Hive and the Honeybee, was first published in 1853 and remains in print even today.  Langstroth’s story is also poignantly notable for a reason that you don’t have to a be a beekeeper to appreciate deeply: his struggles with debilitating depression, which stymied many of his professional endeavors. While working intermittently as a pastor and teacher when his mental health allowed, Langstroth found constant, life-affirming inspiration in the bee world he observed closely through the prism of the hives he kept for most of his adult life.

The history of beekeeping stretches back to prehistoric times, but when Langstroth patented his movable frame beehive in 1852 it created a worldwide revolution in the practice of keeping bees. On this page of his journal, we see the exact moment—the “aha” moment—that Langstroth landed on his brilliant insight: the significance of applying the concept of "beespace" to design hives that allow easier harvesting of honey than possible in earlier hive structures. The rest, as they say, is history.

The journal Langstroth kept is a treasure for several reasons. It provides fascinating insight into pivotal moments of beekeeping’s technological history. It is, as well, an intimate view of resilience in face of sometimes devastating mental health challenges. And last but really not least, in the comments and pet peeves that Langstroth also recorded in his ongoing notes-to-self, his off-the-record writing offers a more mundane but no less instructive tour through the day-to-day concerns—from keeping bee hives productive to the vexing challenges of protecting trade secrets and securing patents for promising new discoveries in a timely way—that would have been top-of-mind for any aspiring agricultural entrepreneur of the 19th century.

Page from "Journal on matters relating to bees, etc.," unpublished manuscript, Lorenzo Langstroth 1852-1895. in the special collections of Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.

The online availability of Langstroth’s journal in both its handwritten and transcribed form has been a work very long in the making. When early 20th century entomologist Everett Franklin Phillipps joined the Cornell faculty 1924, he made it his mission to establish one of the world’s most important collections of beekeeping materials—now known as the E. F. Phillips Collection at Mann Library. Recognizing the importance of one of this collections’ gems—the Langstroth journal—for the beekeeping field, Phillips began the painstaking process of transcribing 600 pages of its cramped, highly slanted script—rendered even more illegible by the frequent ink bleed-through from other pages—into easily readable typescript. The project remained unfinished at the time of Phillips passing in 1951, and others took up the work intermittently over the following decades. But it wasn’t until the epic pandemic-era national lockdown of 2020 that intrepid collections specialist Betsy Elswit finally found herself with the time needed to finish transcribing of the journal's final 200 pages.  Thanks to this heroic work, a browse through the work on the Biodiversity Diversity Heritage Library today provides a look at Langstroth’s original writing with a side-by-side view of transcribed, machine-readable text.  Thank you Betsy! And thank you, Reverend Langstroth, for persevering through the inspirational highs and deep lows of life to impact the practice of beekeeping so profoundly, and to leave us such a rich record of such remarkable scientific observation and personal achievement.

Title page to American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, reproduced in facsimile copy by Oxford University Press, 1958, from Mann Library’s special collections.  Only a handful of copies of the original 1796 publication survive. 

What is American cuisine? In this country of many heritages, that question can have a rich range of answers—but nothing says American food quite like Thanksgiving dinner. And of course a  North American turkey—nominated (alas, unsuccessfully) by Benjamin Franklin as America’s national bird—will likely make a star appearance on most holiday dinner menus being planned in households across the country this week. Those of us planning to fall in line with that tradition have a debt of gratitude to pay to one of our country’s earliest foodies, Amelia Simmons, who is credited with presenting the first-ever printed recipe for stuffed turkey in her seminal late 18th century cookbook, American Cookery.

Simmons’ culinary masterpiece of 1796 is thought to be the earliest American cookbook ever published. Described as the cornerstone of American cooking, the concise publication (47 pages total) also provides the first known recipes for dishes that use “American maize” (aka cornmeal), cranberries, molasses, and squash. Dessert lovers among us will be particularly gratified to learn that Amelia’s instructions for preparing “pompkin pudding” ultimately evolved into our American holiday favorite, good old pumpkin pie. 

Another groundbreaking contribution made by Simmons’ work: American Cookery appears to be the first cookbook anywhere to include instructions for using a chemical leavening agent—in this case pearlash, which is essentially potassium carbonate made from hardwood ash and lye—rather than the slow-going yeast or chancier beaten egg methods—to help make cakes and doughs rise quickly and reliably. Following the Cookery’s publication, the joyous process of preparing dinner biscuits and holiday cakes would never be the same.

Simmons was nothing if not intrepid. At a cost of two shillings and threepence—roughly $1.75 today--her groundbreaking cookbook reached many a colonist and settler household in the young United States of America of her day, and her recipes found their way word-for-word — and almost always unacknowledged— into numerous 19th century American cookbooks that followed. Simmons herself, a self-described “American orphan,” was likely illiterate, having had to rely on a scribe to set her culinary guidance to paper. A reprint that followed her cookbook’s first print run includes a lament about her writing assistant’s bungling (and in Simmons’ mind, possibly even malicious) omission of some key instructions for preparing a number of puddings, creams and cakes  successfully.

 We’ve had a couple of centuries to work out the kinks that came with Simmons’ culinary instructions for some American classics as originally printed. From our perch in time today, we sadly don’t know very much more about the life that Amelia lived beyond her chef d’oeuvre. But as we dig into our Thanksgiving dinners this year--and in the years to come—it seems fitting to include a toast to the culinary craft and chutzpah of this pioneering spirit. Bon appetit and happy holiday!

Sources: 

Stavely, Keith, and Kathleen Fitzgerald, “What America’s First Cookbook Says About Our Country and Its Cuisine,” Smithsonian Magazine, January 18, 2018 (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-americas-first-cookbook-says-about-our-country-its-cuisine-180967809/) 

Wilson, Mary Tolford, “The First American Cookbook,”  Introduction to the  facsimile reprint of American Cookery, by Amelia Simmons, Oxford University Press, 1958

As many of us know, the farming life can be an epically tough vocation. And as some of will also be keenly aware, this has been more true for some than for others.  Thanks to a recent scanning project, we’ve had our eye on the story of The Modern Farmer, a publication produced by the National Federation of Colored Farmers (NFCF) during a stretch of economic history that was hard for most folks in the United States—1929 through 1949—but especially so for African Americans confronting the vise of Jim Crow in the American South. As Black History Month closes out for this year, we’re pleased to share a little of what we’ve learned about this remarkable publication and the people who produced it.

Issued monthly, The Modern Farmer was first and foremost a periodical release of current news of interest to African American farming households. Its purpose: To share information that would advance the efforts of the NFCF in building the capacity of America’s black farmers to prosper. Founded in 1922 by a group of African American entrepreneurs and attorneys led by broker James P. Davis and heavily influenced by the teachings and philosophy of Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute, the NFCF had an initial early focus on building cooperatives and procurement/distribution networks. With this approach, the Federation hoped to secure reliable markets, good prices and fair interest rates for participants, attract a growing membership to these networks, and ultimately make it possible for rural black communities to take care of themselves. Over the years, as it became clear that (yet again) black farmers were being excluded  from the benefits of New Deal legislation and programs, the Federation also turned attention and energy towards strengthening African American farmers' political clout.

Flip through the monthly issues of The Modern Farmer across its 20 years of publication, and you can't help but be impressed with the community purpose that emanates from its lively pages. Reports of farmstead success and tragedy, pithy advice on personal care, nutrition and diet, and school news published in its pages evoke a vibrant sense of shared experience and mutual care. Announcements about scholarship programs and religious conventions publicize opportunities for personal growth. News about lynching events and racially discriminatory hiring practices at specific firms and factories inform its readership on the specific dangers and challenges (and sometimes also more hopeful breakthroughs) happening at local, state as well as national levels.  Of course, the periodical’s dominant content most certainly pertains to farming, as it provided a steady feed of news relevant to farm techniques and operations (e.g. "Ladybugs Used to Save Apples from Insect Parasite"), trends in markets and product marketability (e.g. "Federal Buying of Wheat Said to Be Justified"  and "Potash Improves the Baking Quality of Michigan Potatoes"), and financing ("Biggest Fund in United States History Authorized by Senate: Two Billion Dollar Credit Assures Real Relief." ).  And certainly not least: Across all of its pages, a strong editorial case for the power of organizing and collective strategizing will not be lost on any reader.

Given its timing, the NFCF was not poised particularly well for success. The 1930s were, after all, years that Jim Crow was maturing to its full, noisome ripeness in the American South, adding a huge handicap to widespread African American advancement in any pretty much any industry. While the color line may have been less brutally enforced elsewhere in the United States, it remained, of course, a perniciously widespread reality in American socioeconomic life in all corners of the country. And then of course, there were financial and natural disasters that shaped the Great Depression of the 1930s. Precipitous drops in commodity prices, crushing debt, floods, dust storms, heat waves, pest plagues spelled disaster for farming communities across the United States, black or white. Finally, of critical importance:  the NFCF suffered from a serious internal weakness as well. Organized and largely led by prosperous black businessmen and professionals, the Federation was faulted for not sufficiently speaking to the realities of the land-poor tenant farmers and sharecroppers who made up the bulk of the black farming community of the rural South and who ultimately saw their interests and concerns better served by sharecropper unions and more politically engaged civil rights organizations of the 1930s.

Yet the NFCF was nothing if not energetically determined in its hope of making successful collective self-help and, eventually, a greater political voice, a reality for black farmers. For a time at least, there was good reason to gain confidence about this prospect. In September 1930 "The National Federation of Colored Farmers .... reports that 500 farmers in Holmes County, Mississippi have made the first purchase of a carload of groceries and supplies through the federation. The farmers, by wholesale buying, saved 42 percent on the cost." Later that year, promising negotiations between African American merchant associations in New York City and black farmers with melon and other fruits to sell had begun. By 1939, The Modern Farmer was able to spotlight an impressive victory on its front page:  The Special Assistant to the Administrator of the U.S. Agricultural Adjustment Act had been successfully enjoined to meet with the NFCF to address concerns about the Act’s deleterious effects on black farmers.

Mann Library has the good fortune of being able to offer the full run of The Modern Farmer as part of its special collections in historical agriculture. As far as we know, we may be the only library with this rare and important piece of African American history in its collection. But we’re also happy to say that you don't need to actually walk through the front doors of our building to get a look at this treasure.  Thanks to a recent scanning initiative, The Modern Farmer is now available for anyone with access to a computer and the internet. We invite you to take a look at archive.org. It is worth a good, long browse, for across the lively issues of its two decade run, you will get an amazing view of unflinching determination. The history of African American farmers in the United States may be one of contending with bitterly long odds—but what materials like The Modern Farmer make clear, black farmers have never been silent, passive or submissive in working to make these odds, well, unacceptable.

Sources: 

Gordon Nembhard, Jessica. Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014.

Roll, Jarod. "The Lazarus of American Farmers": The Politics of Black Agrarianism in the Jim Crow South," in Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families Since Reconstruction, edited by Debra A. Reid and Evan P. Bennett, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2012, pp. 132 - 154.

From: Fabre, Jean-Henri. The Life of the Spider. Dodd, Mead, 1919.

It's late October, and our Vaults of Mann focus turns to . . . spiders. Again, you say?! Yes, it’s true, our blog of last October was also creepy spider-focused, and we realize we may be looking a wee bit fixated on arachnids in seeking out our seasonal Halloween thrills. But we've got some good reason. First, of course, we're a life sciences library at a university with a world class entomology department. Second,  we've just opened the new exhibit Arachnophilia  in the Mann Gallery that showcases the work of Cornell arachnologist  Linda Rayor and aims to demonstrate just how fascinating and helpful this much maligned class of animals can be in the web of life on earth. And finally, there’s a happy coincidence: While preparing to celebrate said new installation, we stumbled across a wonderful old book by French science educator and naturalist Henri-Jean Fabre that gives us a look at some great 19th century science writing. No better way, we say, to cast light into the deepening gloom of late fall by sharing some of the lovely sparkle of this fun gem.

In his life time, Henri-Jean Fabre (1823-1915) gained wide renown as an educator, a scientist, and a writer of popular science publications who fervently sought to inspire and engage--rather than intimidate and exclude--a lay audience in the fascinating complexities of insect biology. Between his keen eye for nature study and his lyrical writing, Faber gained the admiration of some great contemporaries, from the likes of Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur to literary giants such as Victor Hugo and Nobel-prize winning Maurice Maeterlinck. Smitten with Fabre's style and philosophy, journalist and literary critic  Alexander Teixera de Mattosand (who also moonlighted as a Fellow in the Zoological Society of London) brought Fabre's science writings to an English and American readership by translating excerpts from Fabre's 11+ volume French-language Souvenirs Entomologiques series and publishing them--the excerpts--as stand-alone English version editions.

Pick up a copy of The Life of the Spider and you won't need more than a few pages to understand Fabre’s popular appeal. What, for example, is not to love about a book that starts with this droll tidbit  on "medical choreography" and the complicated relationship we humans have to the ominous biting wolf spider (more commonly known as tarantula in 19th century Europe)?:  “The Italians have bestowed a bad reputation on the Tarantula, who produces convulsions and frenzied dances in the person stung by her. To cope with ‘tarantism,’ the name given to the disease that follows on the bite of the Italian Spider, you must have recourse to music, the only efficiacious remedy, so they tell us. Special tunes have been noted, those quickest to afford relief. "

For those more interested in robust scientific investigation of actual spider behavior than local spider folklore, continue reading and you’ll quickly also get what you came for. The rest of Fabre’s book presents a close look at Lycosa narbonensis (wolf spider), and other eight-legged creatures--the common garden spider, crab spider, & labyrinth spider among them--found in the sun-scorched hills around Fabre’s home in Avignon, France. Presenting observations  gathered first hand from the field over years, his account educates with carefully documented detail about the hunting, reproductive and early life survival strategies of his spider subjects (e.g. yes, wolf spiders  have a venomous bite that can paralyze and eventually kill small rodents and birds; no, garden spiders do not repair broken webs, but save their energy and silk for creating new ones when existing ones are damaged beyond usefulness). And as he spins out meticulously gathered spider minutiae to his readers, Fabre transfixes with prose that evokes--in its own 19th century style--some of the best in Attenborough-type accounting of nature’s astonishing dramas and quirks.

Fabre likely came to his dedication for bringing science to the people by virtue of his experience as a largely self-taught scientist—born to a poor rural family in the Languedoc region of southern France, his formal schooling was choppy, and much of what he learned in math and science derived from self-study with books borrowed surreptitiously from the classrooms of kindly school masters. Despite these unlikely circumstances, Fabre's intellect, enthusiasm and hard work earned him enough respect to eventually be offered a teaching position as professor of physics and chemistry at the lycée (regional government secondary school) of Avignon, where he complemented his teaching with an indefatigable dedication to scientific research and field biology. In 1866, one of his pioneering investigations—this one related to botany—successfully extracted a coloring agent from the madder plant which was later identified as alizarin and widely adopted as a stain for biological research. Ongoing publication of his explorations of the insect world, via his Souvenirs series steadily earned him a widening reputation extending far beyond southern France.

While a keen observer of nature whose influence Darwin recognized on his own work, Fabre remained a skeptic of Darwin’s theory of evolution—a position that some attribute to his devout Christian beliefs, others to his passion for doing field level study of animal behavior, rather than writing science theory. But while grand theory may not have been Fabre’s thing, his renown as an outstanding entomologist and a science educator remains well deserved. If you’re about to embark on field level study of arachnids of your own, you’ll want to read The Life of the Spider for the tips it gives on things like successfully luring wolf spiders out of their burrows for closer observation. If you’re science communicator, you’ll want to read Fabre's writing for the lovely tone and sense of humor that spices his work so effectively. If you’re a parent, you might consider sharing this gem with your kids, for the lovely enthusiasm for nature discovery it inspires. And it goes without saying, if you want to learn a bit more about spiders and their infamously spook if also alluring ways—especially if you can't quite bring yourself to get up close and personal with a live specimen yourself—this book is for you. It’s a charming and eye-opening read all around—and a pretty good piece of field biology too. 

Sources:

Fabre, Jean-Henri. The Life of the Spider. Dodd, Mead, 1919.

Jean Henri Fabre, French Entomologist, Encyclopaedia Britannica Online

Jean-Henri Fabre, Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Henri_Fabre

Closing out April 2020, the year that we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, we’re grabbing our spotlight of the month from the exhibit we’ve just published:  “Do It Yourself, Do It Together: Earth Thinking 1970 to Tomorrow.” There we’ve given a starring role to a publication that probably more than a few of us are going to remember rather fondly. Published about 2-3 times year from 1968 into the early 1970s’  Whole Earth Catalog offered a quirky, thoughtful, edgy “evaluation and access device,” to help humankind (at least the English speakers among us) tune into books, equipment, tools, educational materials, techniques, and all manner of things that might help make leading a meaningful earth-friendly life possible.

Whole Earth Catalog was the brainchild of eclectic visionary, big thinker, Merry Prankster, biologist-by-training, and education advocate Stewart Brand, who dropped out of the California counterculture in the late 1960s to get busy facing up to an era when pollution was so uncontrolled across widespread regions of the United States that only events as extreme as a burning river—famously, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio—were sufficient to catch the attention of public officials. Produced with the help of a team of free thinkers including Brand’s then-wife Lois Jennings, Whole Earth Catalog proved amazingly popular. From a pickup truck hauling catalogs and wares around a circuit of communes and communities in 1968, it quickly blossomed to a building in Menlo Park, CA, with an estimated 1.5 million copies of the catalog sold in 1972.

Part catalog, part guidebook, part literary ode to new paradigms in thinking about society and economy, Whole Earth Catalog was published regularly between 1968 and 1974, and then irregularly until 1998, when it ceased publication altogether. The layouts, while appearing to be an almost haphazard DIY "zine" in nature, were carefully considered by the publishing team and made with equipment that at the time was considered quite advanced.

As relatively short-lived as the publication was, in many ways,  Whole Earth Catalog captured well the spirit of times, fifty years ago, when the United States celebrated its very first Earth Day in 1970, and the environmental movement in the United States first gathered steam to express a critical urgency to the problem of environmental decline. And maybe one of the reasons many of us remember this funky, in its own way oddly brainy “counterculture” publication so well, is that beautiful image of planet earth, as captured by NASA astronauts in the late 1960s, which adorns many of the Whole Earth Catalog covers. Stewart Brand is often credited for having waged a successful campaign to get NASA to release these extraordinary images. And while there’s reason to believe NASA would have made the images public anyway, Brand was certainly correct in one regard:  It’s hard to look at that Blue Marble and not be moved by a strong sense of how right it is to do what it takes--personal or political--to protect a very beautiful planet.

Viscum album, from Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen in Naturgetreuen Abbildungen Mit Kurz Erläuterndem Texte, by Hermann Adolph Kohler (Berlin, 1887-1898) in the special collections of Albert R. Mann Library.

Ah, the quietly beautiful mistletoe, so closely associated with Victorian Christmas holiday traditions. In Köhler’s Medizinalpflanzen here in Mann Library’s special collections, we’ve found such an irresistibly fetching rendition of this plant that we can’t help but spend a moment to ponder it—and share our musings with you!

Many of us will know mistletoe—neatly clipped, bound in bright red ribbon and hung aloft in a well-trafficked location during the winter holiday season—as an invitation to nip a quick kiss from a friend who may be the subject of some (possibly secret) admiration. But did you know that mistletoe—a semi-parasitic plant native to Europe, most often found growing on apple, pear, nut, evergreen, chestnut, and poplar trees—has a rather long history as a wish-granting agent in cultural lore? Both Celtic and Norse mythologies attribute sacred powers to the mistletoe plant. And ancient Romans and Greeks associated mistletoe with some considerable capacity to promote not only true love and fertility, but peace between warring nations as well. Which is giving at least a few of us here at Mann Library some added incentive to include mistletoe in our holiday decorations this year.

From Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen in Naturgetreuen Abbildungen Mit Kurz Erläuterndem Texte, by Hermann Adolph Kohler (Berlin, 1887-1898) in the special collections of Albert R. Mann Library.

Given this honored place in Europe’s cultural history, perhaps it comes as no surprise that mistletoe continues to attract some attention as a clinical medicinal as well. No, it is not, at least not yet, an FDA approved cancer drug, but some studies, particularly in Europe, have shown some effectiveness in improving cancer-related symptoms, reducing side effects of chemotherapy, and stimulating the human immune system. Undoubtedly more research is needed to provide more definitive directives here, but again we say, the story is promising.

Köhler’s Medizinalpflanzen ranks as one of the most important and easily one of the most beautiful herbals of 19th century Europe. While publisher F. E. Köhler is often cited as its author, Claus Nissen, the renowned historian of botanical illustration, attributes authorship of the content for this compendium to Prussian physician Hermann Adolph Köhler (1834-1879), who devoted much of his career to research in the incipient field of pharmacology. In the early 1880s, German botanist Gustav Pabst began developing and editing the work for sale in installments, which were subsequently organized and published as a multi-volume compilation.  Describing over 400 plants from Europe, North America and various European colonies, Köhler’s Medizinalpflanzen evokes a particular historical moment as well:  Detailed information about the featured plants’ chemical properties and possible applications provided with each description reflects the intensifying interest in exploring the possible commercial uses of the world’s resources for the industrial age. Fine artwork by Walther Müller and Carl Friederich Schmidt (the latter known as one of the most important German botanical illustrators of the time) contributed much to the keen anticipation with which German apothecaries awaited the publication’s serial release. This extraordinary work is available for onsite browsing here at Mann Library—but for an online view do check out the copies available in the Biodiversity Heritage Library collection. We heartily recommend a relaxing and fairly uplifting browse during a quiet moment of the winter holiday season!

Additional sources: 

Kluge, M., “Kräuterbücher (8): Eine neue Sicht der Wissenschaft - wie das Mikroskop den Blick der Medizin veränderte.” Schweizerische Zeitung für Ganzheitsmedizin 2015;27:159-163. https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/431004

Mistletoe (European), https://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/integrative-medicine/herbs/mistletoe-european

Nissen, Claus. Die Botanische Buchillustration: Ihre Geschichte Und Bibliographie. 2. Aufl., durchgesehener und verb., A. Hiersemann, 1966.

“Von Köhler's Medizinalpflanzen,” Archiv der Pharmazie, v. 226, issue 10, 1888. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ardp.18882261009