Jacob Bigelow American medical botany 1817-1820

American medical botany being a collection of the native medicinal plants of the United States, containing their botanical history and chemical analysis, and properties and uses in medicine, diet and the arts, with colored engravings.

Lane Catalog Record

Click the images to see the full-size versions.

Jacob Bigelow. American medical botany. 1817-1820. Title page.

The importance of Jacob Bigelow's American Medical Botany, being a Collection of the Native Medicinal Plants of the United States, lies in its illustrations. Along with William Barton's Vegetable Materia Medica, publication of which was almost simultaneous, Bigelow's book was one of the first two American botanical books with colored illustrations. More significantly, Bigelow's work was the first book published in the United States to have plates printed in colors. Like Barton, Bigelow originally intended to illustrate his massive work in traditional fashion with hand-colored copperplates, hiring the engraver William B. Annin and numerous colorists to produce the plates for Vol. I, part 1. But, finding this process too slow and expensive, Bigelow searched for a method that would allow the swift and easy application of color directly onto the plate, as well as allow rapid cleaning of the plate between impressions. Richard Wolfe showed that Bigelow turned to a printing process involving etched stone, a technique developed in Europe shortly before Alois Senefelder's invention of lithography in 1795-1796; it is likely, however, that Bigelow and his engravers discovered this technique independently, as printing from stone was little known in America at this time.

The three volumes of Bigelow's book each originally appeared in two fascicules, making a total of six fascicules in all. Because sets of hand-colored engravings had already been prepared for Vol. I, fascicule 1, Bigelow used them to complete the earliest copies of that part in order to meet his publication deadlines, adding the color prints as soon as the stone-printing process was perfected. Wolfe declares that "there are two states of the first number in American medical botany, one having hand-colored plates and the other having color printed plates." In addition there are some copies which have a combination of hand-colored and color-printed plates in volume 1, fascicule 1.

—J. Norman, 2006

Pl. VII. Sanguinaria Canadensis