Cleveland's Treasures from the World of Botanical Literature (review)

Stanley H. Johnston, Jr. Cleveland's Treasures from the World of Botanical Literature. Wilmington, Ohio: Orange Frazer Press, 1998. xvi + 141 pp. Ill. $24.95 (paperbound).

The combined resources of the Holden Arboretum, the Cleveland Botanical Garden, and the Cleveland Medical Library Association (CMLA) make Cleveland, Ohio, a treasure-house of rare herbals and botanical works. In 1992 Stanley Johnston published a catalog, The Cleveland Herbal, Botanical, and Horticultural Collections (Kent State University Press), which describes more than a thousand pre-1830 imprints--a volume I consult very often for bibliographic information on early botanical books. That is, however, a work intended for specialists. And, while it must have been satisfying to Dr. Johnston to record the books properly, it must have also been a great frustration to be able to include only a small sample of their illustrations, and then only in black-and-white reproductions. Thanks to the generosity of a number of private donors and foundations, Dr. Johnston, the curator of rare books at the Holden Arboretum, can now give a grand tour of the glories of these collections. Cleveland's Treasures overflows with color illustrations of their books, prints, and original paintings.

Cleveland's Treasures holds special interest for historians of medicine. Many of the pictures show medicinal plants, and many of the books were owned by physicians and pharmacists. The CMLA's oldest collection is a set of books inscribed by Dr. Nicolaus Pol (ca. 1470-1532), who served on a medical fact-finding commission sent from Salzburg to Spain to investigate the value of the New World drug guaiacum as a cure for syphilis. The CMLA preserves the working collection of a nineteenth-century Ohio physician, Dr. Jared Potter Kirtland (1793-1877), as well as books collected by several generations of Cleveland physicians in the Cushing family. Some eighty herbals in the CMLA were gathered by George Gehring Marshall, heir to the Marshall Drug Company in Cleveland, who showed an early fascination with the history of medicine by writing a thesis on medieval animal drugs for his degree at Western Reserve's pharmacy school.

The book is engagingly written and handsomely produced, but it has some unexpected flaws. The plants pictured are identified only by their labels in the original illustrations, and then not always accurately: I spotted six typographical errors or misunderstandings of Latin in the captions to the first chapter alone. The books discussed and illustrated are indexed by author and cross-referenced to the 1992 catalog; however, the reader who does not have easy access to the earlier catalog and its indexes is left stranded. There is no way to find the names of botanists, collectors, artists, printers, places, or plants. In the end, some of the attention lavished on the design would have been better spent on indexing and proofreading.

Karen Reeds
Princeton Research Forum, and
National Coalition of Independent Scholars

...