Hello all and happy new year! With the demise of 2020 we at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia are looking forward to a year chock full of promise. With that in mind, guest writer and Mütter intern Ella Serpell has prepared a series of three articles on a new project for the These articles coincide with the anniversary of the death of Swedish botanist , whom you will learn more about in Ella's articles.
Ella, take it away!
My name is Ella and I am an intern at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia working with the Benjamin Rush Medicinal Garden. One of the projects that I am doing research for is the creation of a Mütter Herbarium, a new initiative that we are planning to officially begin in the Spring of 2021.
An herbarium is a collection of herbarium sheets, pieces of paper that contain one dried plant specimen and information about the species. By drying and pressing the plant flat, the specimen is preserved and becomes easier to store and transport. This is helpful in studying plants because it can increase access to plant material from many more eras and locations than could normally coexist. To create the Mütter Herbarium, we will collect specimens of each of the plants in the garden when they flower, drying them to create a historical record and a collection that will be available year-round and illustrate every plant in flower no matter the season.
This project was initially inspired by the work of Dr. Elaine Ayers at NYU who started a in March during the initial phase of the Covid-19 lockdown. She asked people to preserve local plants and send in photos that could be collected into a somewhat atypical digital herbarium. She later gave a digital lecture with the Wagner Free Institute of Science titled “Marking Time in Nature: The Quarantine Herbarium in Historical Perspective” where she discussed the history of herbariums, who and what information is included and excluded, and talked about the future of herbarium collections. After this lecture, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia decided to create a Mütter Herbarium as a new way to aesthetically admire the garden, a tool for scientific exploration and sharing of the plants in the garden, and also as a tool for thinking about herbariums and botany from a historical perspective. This blog post serves as Part 1 of a series on herbaria and reflects on what information a herbarium can hold and what decisions have the power to determine this.
What information does a herbarium sheet hold?
When botanists use herbarium sheets for research, what information are they actually able to get from them? The herbarium sheet tries to mimic the kind of information one could get from looking directly at a living plant, such as the shape and number of leaves and flowers, and other morphological characteristics. Additionally, unlike a scientific illustration, which aims to accurately represent the taxonomically important parts of the plant, herbarium sheets contain actual plant material. This means that there is often more information stored than the original collector might have noted or cared about, such as microscopic details. This leaves room for future scientists to make observations directly from plant material of that time. The most extreme example of this may be in research that has been able to extract and analyze DNA from old herbarium samples that were collected before the collector would have known the structure or relevance of this molecule.
However, even with a preserved sample and all the information that is built into that specimen, there is a lot of information about the plant that is lost when it is removed from its natural environment, dried, and placed on a blank sheet of paper. It can remove physical information, including the growth pattern that the plant has on the ground, the soil and condition in which it was growing, other species that were growing around it or living on it, or any volatile chemicals that may dissipate after drying. It may also somewhat change the physical representation from the original. The color might fade, the texture change, or the chemical compounds degrade. Isolating the specimen on a sheet also removes cultural and historical information about the plant. Where is it from and who lives around it? How is it named or classified by those indigenous to the area? Does anyone use it for food, medicine, tools, religious practices, or anything else? Who found it? Who carried it back to be transported to its final destination?
Much of this information, though not included in the biological specimen, does eventually get recorded on the herbarium sheet in the written notes taken by the collector and attached to the specimen. Standard descriptions will always include the scientific name, the date and location of the collection, the collector, and some additional descriptions of the plant or the environment. This can be as simple or as detailed as the collector wants. Some collectors will have a color chart that allows them to record the exact color of different plant parts at the time of collection. They may describe the environment, the smell, the texture, and anything else they find of interest. Some collectors might also include any common or indigenous names that may help future scientists ask about the plant.
However, all this written information, not to mention the plant parts collected and how they are arranged, is at the discretion of the collector. This means that they may not anticipate information being important in the future and never think to note it. It also means that certain people and contexts can be removed from the history of these plants. Who is noted as the collector? Is it the botanist running an expedition or the person who climbed down a ravine to acquire it? Historically, it would often be the former. In general, this separation of the specimen and "scientifically relevant" information from other information about the plant could skew the perspective of those studying the sheet. For example, it might allow colonial botanists to study the plants of an empire without ever facing the realities of colonialism that surrounded them. It also gave European scientists a sheet that they could organize into their own system, with a new Latin name, without considering if the plant already existed in the classification systems or scientific knowledge of other cultures. Is the first person to name a species in the Linnaean system of classification really the first person to "discover" a species? It is especially interesting to ask this when the scientist who would define and name it often based this from the study of a herbarium sheet and may have never seen the live plant in situ.
Reflecting on the ramifications of which information typically was included in these herbarium sheets, we have started considering what information we will be including in ours. We hope that because of our increased flexibility, the Mütter Herbarium can serve as an opportunity to experiment and explore new possibilities for what a herbarium can be.
With this in mind, what information do you think is important, and what would you like to see recorded in the Mütter Herbarium?
Thanks, Ella! Be sure to check back for the remaining two installments in this series.
Sources:
Ayers, Elaine. “Quarantine Herbarium: A Record of Nature from Home, Produced during COVID-19,” March 2020. .
Ayers, Elaine. “Marking Time in Nature: The Quarantine Herbarium in Historical Perspective,” Online presentation for the Wagner Free Institute, July 8th 2020.
Bleichmar, Daniela. Visible empire: Botanical expeditions and visual culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment. University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Endersby, Jim. Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Verlinde, Sarah. “History and Modern Uses of a Herbarium.” UW Bothell Herbarium, October 2016. https://www.uwb.edu/getattachment/wetlands/herbarium/herbarium-history-and-modern-uses/History-of-Herbaria-Infosheet.pdf. Harshberger, John. The Botanists of Philadelphia and Their Work. Philadelphia: TC Davis and sons, 1899.