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  • Matthiola incana (L.)W.T.Aiton Brassicaceae Distribution: The genus name commemorates Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1500/1–77), physician and botanist, whose name is Latinised to Matthiolus.. Incana means hoary or grey, referring to the colour of the leaves. Mattioli's commentaries on the Materia Medica of Dioscorides were hugely popular. Matthiola incana was first described by Linnaeus as Cheiranthus incanus, being changed to Matthiola by William Aiton, at Kew, in 1812. It is in the cabbage family. Commercial seed packets contain a mixture of single and double forms. The latter are sterile, but selective breeding has increased the proportion of double forms from the seed of single forms to as much as 80%. ‘Ten week stocks’ are popular garden annuals, flowering in the year of sowing, whereas ‘Brompton stocks’ (another variety of M. incana) are biennials, flowering the following year. Gerard (1633), called them Stocke Gillofloure or Leucoium, and notes the white and purple forms, singles and doubles. About their medicinal value he writes ‘not used in Physicke except among certain Empiricks and Quacksalvers, about love and lust matters, which for modestie I omit’. The thought of a member of the cabbage family being an aphrodisiac might encourage the gullible to take more seriously the government’s plea to eat five portions of vegetable/fruit per day. Photographed in the Medicinal Garden of the Royal College of Physicians, London.
  • Tigridia pavonia (L.f.)DC. Iridaceae Distribution: Peru. These colourful, tulip-like flowers were named by De Candolle for Joseph (José) Pavón Jiménez (1754-1840), the Spanish pharmacist/botanist who accompanied Hipólito Ruiz and Joseph Dombey on their epic botanising in Peru and Chile (1777-1788) in search of quinine and medicinal plants. On the 8th April 1777, King Carlos III of Spain gave permission for the three botanists and two artists to travel from Spain to America to study the flora of Peru and Chile, then Spanish dominions. Initially around Lima, and then further afield, they collected plants which their artists painted
  • Two ladies indoors contemplate a house plant which is loosing its foliage. Mezzotint.
  • Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker in the Rhododendron area of the Himalaya. Mezzotint by W. Walker, after F. Stone, 1854.
  • Nicholas Joseph, Freiherr von Jacquin, and his brother Joseph Franz. Line engraving by Mathieu, 1802, after a wax medallion by L. Posch.
  • Scorpion and snake fighting, Anglo-Saxon. circa 1050
  • François Nicolas Marquet. Line engraving by C.F. Nicole, 1763.
  • Cione di Lapo Pollini. Line engraving.
  • Friedrich Ehrhart. Aquatint silhouette.
  • Exhibition: Medicine under three Queens; Elizabeth, Anne and Victoria.
  • A man holding flowers. Oil painting.
  • Robert Brown. Photograph by Maull & Polyblank.
  • Charles de l'Écluse or Carolus Clusius (1526 – 1609)
  • Charles de l'Écluse or Carolus Clusius (1526 – 1609)
  • Portrait of Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778),
  • Baron Albrecht von Haller. Line engraving.
  • Colin Milne, with a view of Greenwich Hospital. Stipple engraving by Holl, 1804, after J. Russell, and by Newton.
  • Colin Milne, with a view of Greenwich Hospital. Stipple engraving by Holl, 1804, after J. Russell, and by Newton.
  • Colin Milne, with a view of Greenwich Hospital. Stipple engraving by Holl, 1804, after J. Russell, and by Newton.
  • A donkey as a physician taking the pulse of a dying man. Aquatint with etching by F. Goya, ca. 1797.
  • A donkey as a physician taking the pulse of a dying man. Aquatint with etching by F. Goya, ca. 1797.
  • Tiger Lily
  • Tiger Lily
  • Tiger Lily
  • Tiger Lily
  • Tiger Lily
  • Tiger Lily
  • Tiger Lily
  • Sir James Edward Smith, with a vignette of the pursuit of the ship containing the Linnean collection by order of the King of Sweden. Stipple engraving by W. Ridley, 1800, after J. Russell.
  • Sir James Edward Smith, with a vignette of the pursuit of the ship containing the Linnean collection by order of the King of Sweden. Stipple engraving by W. Ridley, 1800, after J. Russell.