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WORK TITLE: American Eden
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1969
WEBSITE:
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
https://www.americaneden.org/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1969, in Ithaca, NY.
EDUCATION:Yale University, B.A.; Columbia University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author. Hunter College, City University of New York, New York, NY, associate professor. Mellon Visiting Scholar, New York Botanical Garden.
AWARDS:Cullman fellow.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Victoria Johnson has built a career for herself in the world of academia. She works under Hunter College, serving as a professor. Prior to starting her career, Johnson attended Columbia University and Yale University, earning her bachelor’s degree at the latter and her doctorate at the former. Her work in academia has granted her several honors, including a position with the New York Botanical Garden as one of their Mellon Visiting Scholars, as well as a Cullman fellowship.
American Eden: David Hosack, Botany and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic serves as Johnson’s debut work. The book serves as a profile of David Hosack, a botanist and physician who achieved the majority of his prominence in 1700s New York. The book starts at the early stages of Hosack’s career, when he was still a medical student studying at the University of Edinburgh, Princeton University, and Columbia College. Hosack studied his field of expertise for numerous years, then relocated to London, England in the final decade of the 1700s. There, his studies continued. It was during his time in the city of London that Hosack began fostering a deep-seated interest in botany, and the way plants played an integral part in treating the human body. He was also able to establish and cultivate bonds with professional scientists in England, who then lent their expertise to other professionals throughout the United States. When he relocated back within the city of New York, Hosack decided to make his interest in botany a central part of his professional career. He then opened his own private practice, and it was from there that his career blossomed.
In addition to describing the highlights of Hosack’s career, Johnson also devotes attention to Hosack’s involvement within American history. Hosack devoted much of his career to spreading his knowledge of plants, medicine, and their close relationship among other professional physicians within the United States. Hosack also became involved within American history in numerous other ways, including his role in the duel that took place between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, where he served as their on-site doctor. As Johnson explains, Hosack maintained successful professional relationships with both figures, as he helped them to develop their own passions for botany and home gardens. He also served as a private doctor for the both of them, even outside of their duel.
Johnson also details many of Hosack’s botanical discoveries, especially as he pioneered the very first botanical center to be established within the United States. Much of the funding for the garden came from Hosack himself. Hosack’s garden included numerous plants, like the roundleaf sundew, among many others. In addition to creating the Elgin Botanic Garden, Hosack also assisted with art education institutions, boosted the spread of innovative forms of treatment for different ailments, and established a journal for medical professionals. In expounding upon Hosack’s career, Johnson also sheds light on the realities of the medical world in 1700s-era America. Johnson also explains the impact Hosack has left upon the world and upon the gardening and botanical communities, who still use Hosack’s findings within their own work and pursuits to this day.
A Publishers Weekly contributor stated: “Johnson exhibits a welcome eye for the telling detail.” The reviewer also recommended the book to “history buffs and avid gardeners.” A writer in Kirkus Reviews called the book “an adroit portrait of an early American physician who became a pioneering horticulturist.” On the Shelf Awareness website, Sara Catterall remarked: “Johnson’s storytelling skills and her thorough knowledge of the period and the science makes this a book that will appeal to history lovers, botanists and gardeners alike.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2018, review of American Eden: David Hosack, Botany and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic.
Publishers Weekly, April 30, 2018, review of American Eden, p. 52.
ONLINE
American Eden website, https://www.americaneden.org (July 9, 2018), author profile.
Shelf Awareness, http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ (May 11, 2018), Sara Catterall, review of American Eden.
Victoria Johnson was born in 1969 in Ithaca, New York. She earned her undergraduate degree in philosophy at Yale and her doctorate in sociology at Columbia. She has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library and a Mellon Visiting Scholar at the New York Botanical Garden. She teaches on the history of philanthropy, the arts, the natural environment, and New York City at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Her latest book, AMERICAN EDEN, is a biography of the doctor at the Hamilton-Burr duel, David Hosack, a pioneering physician and botanist. Hosack's botanical garden, the first in the new Republic, is now buried under Rockefeller Center.
For the companion website, visit www.americaneden.org.
About Victoria Johnson
I am a former Cullman Fellow and am currently an associate professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College in New York City, where I teach on the history of philanthropy and New York City. I hold a doctorate in sociology from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Yale.
Victoria Johnson, a former Cullman Fellow, is currently an associate professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College in New York City, where she teaches on the history of philanthropy.
American Eden: David Hosack, Botany and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic
Publishers Weekly. 265.18 (Apr. 30, 2018): p52.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
American Eden: David Hosack, Botany and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic
Victoria Johnson. Liveright, $29.95 (448p)
ISBN 978-1-63149-419-2
Johnson, an associate professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College, dives deeply into the life of David Hosack (1769-1835), whose work as a leading physician and as the foremost American botanist of his time provides a window into the United States' formative post-Revolutionary years. Johnson first examines Hosack's early medical training, at Columbia College, Princeton, and the University of Edinburgh, and his efforts to increase the era's medical knowledge. In parallel, she explicates the political and personal rivalries that consumed the fledgling U.S., experienced firsthand by Hosack as attending physician at Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr's infamous 1804 duel. Johnson focuses, however, on Hosack's hard-won creation of the country's first botanical garden, lacing the text with surprisingly entertaining descriptions of some of the hundreds of plants Hosack enthusiastically acquired, such as the carnivorous roundleaf sundew, used by some Native Americans as a "wart remover ... and also a love potion." Johnson exhibits a welcome eye for the telling detail--noting, for instance, that for 18th-century medical students the "dissection season" began in autumn, when the weather cooled and corpses lasted longer. History buffs and avid gardeners will find Hosack an appealing and intriguing figure who doubles as an exemplar of the qualities of a vibrant and expanding America. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"American Eden: David Hosack, Botany and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic." Publishers Weekly, 30 Apr. 2018, p. 52. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537852291/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=943cf017. Accessed 5 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537852291
Johnson, Victoria: AMERICAN EDEN
Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Johnson, Victoria AMERICAN EDEN Liveright/Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $29.95 6, 5 ISBN: 978-1-63149-419-2
A biography of David Hosack (1769-1835), a nature-obsessed doctor who "was convinced that saving lives also depended on knowing the natural world outside the human body."
Trivia buffs may know Hosack as the physician who attended the 1804 duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. He certainly deserves a fuller portrait, and in her first book, Johnson (Urban Policy and Planning/Hunter Coll.) writes an admiring account of the energetic physician, who mingled with the Founding Fathers, lectured in medical schools across the country, and created America's first botanical garden. After training in America, Hosack traveled to Britain in 1792 to take advantage of its superior schooling. This included the study of medicinal plants, a more important element in medical practice during that time than today. He became fascinated with botany and brought this passion home in 1794. Settling in New York, he built a prosperous practice and became a university professor in both medicine and botany. Remaining neutral in national politics allowed him to treat both Hamilton and his bitter enemy, Burr. In 1801, he bought 20 acres in then-rural mid-Manhattan and built a huge botanical garden replete with greenhouses and hothouses. Universally praised, it became an educational and research center. However, the expenses were ruinous even for a wealthy physician, and Hosack, supported by influential friends, lobbied for government support. Legislators were unenthusiastic until 1810, when New York state bought it for less than Hosack wanted; then the government showed little interest in maintenance, so it fell into decay. As a physician, Hosack was not ahead of his time. He bled patients, prescribed toxins such as mercury, and administered drugs that produced vomiting, sweating, or diarrhea. This was accepted practice, and Johnson gives his healing efforts perhaps more credit than they deserve, but she provides an engaging tale of an important life in early America.
An adroit portrait of an early American physician who became a pioneering horticulturist.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Johnson, Victoria: AMERICAN EDEN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375043/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9dba7b2b. Accessed 5 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375043
Book Review
Review: American Eden
American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic by Victoria Johnson (Liveright, $29.95 hardcover, 480p., 9781631494192, June 5, 2018)
David Hosack (1769-1835) was a celebrity in his day. He was the founder of the first botanical garden in the United States, an early adopter of new medical treatments, a charismatic teacher and public speaker who started a botanical craze that echoes to the present. American Eden is an exhaustively researched, brilliant and lively biography set in the close political, social and intellectual circles of the new Republic by professor of urban planning Victoria Johnson (Backstage at the Revolution).
Hosack is a genuinely interesting figure in his own right--brilliant, adventurous, hardworking and acquainted with many of the great minds of his day. Johnson amplifies his appeal by emphasizing his relationships with Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, as their family physician and as collaborator in their gardens and botanical interests.
Hosack studied at Columbia, and with some of the most brilliant botanical and medical minds of the day in Edinburgh and London at a time when medical dissection sparked riots. He built and maintained relationships with European scientists that helped establish the scientific community of his young nation.
Back in New York, he became an admired professor, founded one of the first U.S. medical journals, promoted effective new medical treatments and championed the Hudson River School of painting. He founded the nation's first botanic garden mostly out of his own pocket in what is now midtown Manhattan, modeling it on the medical research gardens he had encountered overseas. "The Elgin Botanic Garden had less in common with a beautiful city park than with the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and Crispr gene-editing laboratories."
Hosack and his students also ignited a national craze for botany that still echoes in the public parks and private gardens of the United States. Johnson's storytelling skills and her thorough knowledge of the period and the science makes this a book that will appeal to history lovers, botanists and gardeners alike. --Sara Catterall
Shelf Talker: The story of a visionary New York botanist, doctor and influential teacher in the energetic and competitive young United States.