Page 14 - Pharmacy History 32 July 2007

His schooling was not a success and at the age of 17 years his father removed him from his school, the Vaxjo Grammar School, and apprenticed him as a shoe-maker. Fortunately, the local general medical practitioner,
Dr Johan Rothman, ‘having on
one chance occasion spoken with
the young man, realised that he
had about him the mark of another destiny’. He was encouraged to study medicine and botany. As Linnaeus was still too poor to enter university, Dr Rothman acted as an advocate
on the lad’s behalf and the youth was employed as a copyist in the library of the University of Lund. He studied clandestinely in the library at night. In 1728 Linnaeus moved to Uppsala to commence medical studies. It was whilst he was a medical student that he conceived of the idea, building
on the works of earlier taxonomists, of using the sexual reproductive organs of flowers, as a system of classification. Whilst still a medical student in 1735, he published Systema Naturae, which ran to 18 editions throughout the next 100 years. His Fundamenta Botanica was published in 1736, and his Genera Plantarum in 1737. For three years (1735-1738) he worked in Holland, as assistant to Dr George Clifford, a physician and banker at the village of Hartecamp, near Haarlem. At the age of 31 Linnaeus returned to Sweden, practised as a physician
in Stockholm for three years and thereafter went to Uppsala where his research concerning the classification of plants and animals continued.
He was appointed as a teacher in
the University of Uppsala where he became a much-loved and esteemed teacher and mentor of medical students.
In the University Botanical Garden at Uppsala he cultivated coffee and rice plants, cocao trees, the ginger plant and the papyrus reed, various species of tea and different species of cactus and lilies from many parts of the world. He landscaped his garden such that it was divided into 24 classes, arranged according to the ‘sexual system’ of classification which he had developed.
His joint appointment, like most of the other senior medical teaching positions in Europe of his era, was that of the combined Chair of Medicine and Botany. As Professor Linnaeus he became famous for his conducted field collecting trips with his medical students on Sunday rambles, collecting and classifying flowers and discussing relevant aspects of materia medica – the procedures
by which active principles can be extracted from leaves and flowers, roots and bark. It is recalled that the townspeople of Uppsala always knew when Linnaeus and his students
were returning from their Sunday excursions, as there was much singing (due to the wine drunk and picnic eaten at lunchtime in the woods). The boisterous and laughing group would return to the town with their medicinal plants and with flowers in their hats.
At a time when university teaching throughout Europe was particularly formal, and in Sweden where it was particularly so, Linnaeus’ lectures struck a new and fascinating
cord. They were recorded as being ‘inexcusably merry, particularly those on dietetics, the subject field in his official duties to which he perhaps especially liked to imply himself. As a lecturer, Linnaeus was often dramatic and slightly shocking, full of examples from contemporary life and from his
own experience, concrete but not in the least wooden, and a mixture of medicine and moralism suited him specially’.
His courses became hugely popular and he developed not only a major undergraduate following but also an esteemed postgraduate reputation as well.
Aftermath
Linnaeus’ system of classification brought with it another legacy.
That legacy was the infrastructure
by which the names of worthy individuals could be memorialised. Linnaeus himself established this system, incorporating into his formal Latin generic and specific taxonomy the names of Greek gods and other figures of classical mythology. This is perhaps most romantically illustrated by his creation of and formalisation of many of the vernacular names of butterflies in common local use.1
To the butterflies he assigned the genus name Papilio, and within it
he assigned a Latin name to each of the 192 species known to science in his time. He named almost all of the species after legendary figures from ancient Greece. They were names that every educated person knew from the Homeric and other legends of antiquity. Among what today are called the swallowtail butterflies,
Papilio ulysses
(Cont. page 15)
14 ■ Pharmacy History Australia
volume 3 ■ no 32 ■ JULY 2007