Background

Benjamin Smith Barton was born on February 10, 1766, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, United States. His father, Thomas Barton, attended Trinity College, Dubhn; came to Pennsylvania in 1750; and married David Rittenhouse’s older sister, Esther, in 1753. Ordained in the Anglican Church, he worked with the Indians around Carlisle, and settled on Conestoga Creek. Benjamin’s mother died in 1774, and his father in 1780, leaving Benjamin an orphan at fourteen.

Education

Educated by his older brother, William, Benjamin Barton early showed a liking for history, natural history, and drawing. Between 1780 and 1782, Barton studied at York Academy in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he showed an aptitude for drawing and an interest in collecting natural history specimens. Two years later, he attended the College of Philadelphia School of Medicine, studied medicine under Thomas Shippen, and attended Benjamin Rush's lectures in 1785.

In 1786, Barton transferred to the University of Edinburgh, where he studied for two years before leaving without a degree because of financial difficulties and disagreements with two professors. During the first of his two years (1786-1787) of medical studies at the University of Edinburgh, although twice ill, he won for his dissertation on black henbane the Harveian Prize, which he did not receive until about 1813. Barton did not receive a medical degree from Edinburgh, nor is there confirmation that he did from Gottingen, but he received a diploma from Lisbon Academy, Portugal. He took no pride in the Lisbon diploma, however, and in 1796 he wrote (but may not have sent) a letter to D. Christopher Ebeling of Hamburg University, seeking a degree from that or another German university.

Career

In 1789, at the age of twenty-three, Barton returned to Philadelphia to become a professor of natural history and botany; in 1795 he succeeded to the professorship of materia medica, and in 1813 he added the professorship of the practice of physic to his already too busy life. For ten years (1790-1800) he served as one of the American Philosophical Society’s curators, and from 1802 to 1815 as one of its vice-presidents. He visited Thomas Jefferson at Monticello in 1802, and revisited Virginia in 1805.

Barton was continually publishing short papers on his observations, or those related to him by his associates, not always with permission or acknowledgment. His prose was diffuse and sometimes redundant; he seldom revised but expostulated in an intimate style. His interpretations of complex phenomena generally followed the views of the antiquarians. His bibliography is a farrago, for he continually announced projected works, varying their titles. He began a revision of Gronovius’ Flora Virginica, and a “Flora of Pennsylvania.”

In 1808 he began editing successful European works, relating the content to American readers. Meanwhile, to the dismay of Jefferson and others, his natural history of the Lewis and Clark expedition lay unfinished. In 1815 Barton revisited France and England, then died within two weeks of his return to Philadelphia.

Achievements

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  Barton's major achievement was in being the author of the first botanical textbook published in the United States, Elements of Botany (1803), which ran to six editions (three during his lifetime); an influential teacher at the University of Pennsylvania (his students included William Darlington, William Baldwin, Charles Wilkins Short, Thomas Horsfield, and Meriwether Lewis); the patron of Frederick Pursh and Thomas Nuttali, with whose specimens he hoped to produce a flora of North America; and the owner of the largest private natural history library of his time. Between 1797 and 1807 he assembled what was then the largest herbarium of native plants (1,674 specimens).

Works

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• book

  • A Vocabulary of Wyandot

    (This volume contains 145 words of Wyandot collected by Co...)

    1796
  • Fragments of the Natural History of Pennsylvania 1799
  • Elements Of Botany: Or, Outlines Of The Natural History Of Vegetables 1803
  • A Vocabulary of Stockbridge Mahican 1798
  • New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America 1797
  • Elements of Botany 1803
  • A Memoir Concerning the Fascinating Faculty which Has Been Ascribed to the Rattle-snake, and Other American Serpents 1797
  • A Discourse On Some Of The Principal Desiderata In Natural History: And On The Best Means Of Promoting The Study Of Science, In The United-states 1807
  • Barton's Fragments of the natural history of Pennsylvania 1799
  • A Biographical Sketch 1816
  • Barton's Medical Journal 1808
  • The Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal 1803
  • Collections For An Essay Towards A Materia Medica Of The United States 1788
  • The Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal 1808

Membership

Barton was a member of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh. He was also a member and served as vice president of the American Philosophical Society from 1802 to 1815, and a member and president of the Philadelphia Medical Society from 1808 to 1815. In 1812, he was elected as a member to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

• 

  the American Philosophical Society , United States

  1802 - 1815

Personality

Physical Characteristics: Barton’s health was affected by gout, and after he was made one of four annual presidents of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh, he was entrusted with a sum of the Society’s money, which he was unable to return before his departure. Therefore, his “irritable and even choleric” disposition with his colleagues, influenced by his gout, was no doubt worsened by the consciousness of the sum unreturned to the Medical Society.

Quotes from others about the person

• His nephew, W. P. C. Barton, wrote: “The struggles he made in early life through the most discouraging, nay appalling influence of want, added to the direful ravages of disease - his subsequent elevation appears astonishing. He whose mental exertions survive such a fate, and who perseveres through it, is not, believe me, a common man!”
  
  Elliott Coues said about Barton: “Every qualification of a great naturalist except success, his actual achievements being far from commensurate with his eminent ability and erudition.”

Connections

In 1797 Barton married Mary Pennington, by whom he had two children, Thomas Pennant and Hetty.

Father:

Thomas Barton

Mother:

Esther (Rittenhouse) Barton

Son:

Thomas Pennant Barton 1803-1869

Brother:

William Barton

Uncle:

David Rittenhouse

Wife:

Mary Pennington

Daughter:

Hetty Barton

nephew:

W. P. C. Barton

associate:

Adam Kuhn

In 1790, Barton succeeded Adam Kuhn as professor of Natural History and Botany at the College of Philadelphia.

References

• Benjamin Smith Barton: Naturalist and Physician in Jeffersonian America
• Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  1970
• Biographical Dictionary of American and Canadian Naturalists and Environmentalists
  1997
• Encyclopaedia Britannica
  1911
• American medical biographies 1920
  1920