John Gerard

Background

John Gerard was born at Nantwich, Cheshire, towards the end of 1545. He belonged to a branch of the family of Gerard of Ince in Lancashire.

Education

John received his schooling education at nearby Willaston. Around the age of 17, in 1562 he became an Apprentice to Alexander Mason, a barber-surgeon of the Barber-Surgeon's Company.

Career

Gerard traveled, presumably as a ship’s surgeon, aboard a merchant ship of the Company of Merchant Adventurers in London trading the Baltic, for he stated later that he had been in Denmark, Sweden, Poland, and Russia. He then settled in London and probably carried on his profession of barber-surgeon while developing his horticultural interests.

By 1577 he had become superintendent of the gardens belonging to William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, at the Strand, London, and at Theobalds, Hertfordshire, a post he held for the next twenty-one years. He possessed a garden of his own at Holborn, London, so well stocked in 1597, according to George Baker, surgeon to Queen Elizabeth. In 1596 Gerard issued a catalog of his plants, the first such in England, followed by a second edition in 1599. This period was one of horticultural expansion in England, many new plants being introduced from abroad through the powerful influence of Cecil and others. Gerard undoubtfully acquired a detailed firsthand knowledge of them, which reflected in his Herball. His standing as a barber-surgeon, which necessitated a knowledge of medicinal plants, and as a practical gardener led to his appointment from 1586 to 1603 or 1604 as curator of a physic garden belonging to the College of physicians of London. In 1597 he was elected junior warden of the Barber-Surgeon’s Company and in 1608 master.

The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes, first published in 1597, is the best-known and most often quoted herbal in the English language. Its lasting repute due not so much to its originality and accuracy, which are offtimes questionable, as to its entertaining Elizabethan descriptive style, its interspersed anecdotes and comments, its antique remedies, and its woodcuts.

It occupies 1,392 pages plus introductory matter and index, and has nearly 2,200 woodcut illustrations, most of which, had already been used by Tabernaemontanus, whose woodblocks had been obtained from Frankfurt am Main. The work is divided into three books. The first deals with monocotyledons; the second with all sorts of herbes for meate, medicine, or sweetesmelling use; and the third, with trees, shrubs, bushes, fruit-hearing plants, Rosins, Gums, Roses, Heath, Mosses, Mushroms, Corall and their several kinds. These books are divided into numerous short chapters, each dealing with a small group of plants and setting forth the kinds, description, place, time, names, nature, and virtues, agreeing with the best received opinions. Such a vast work was necessarily compiled from other works and much of it came from Dodoens’ Stirpiurn historiae pemtades ex. Account 1584 a young London physician and Cambridge graduate Robert Priest, was requested by the London printers and booksellers Bonham and John Norton to translate Dodoen’s Latin work into English, and they retained his services until 1590, but this translation had evidently not been completed when he died in 1596 or 1597.

To what extent Gerard was indebted to Priest’s work is quite uncertain. Although this book is probably not so gross an example of successful piracy and plagiarism as it is sometimes considered. Gerard’s honesty has certainly been much questioned and little defended since the adverse comments and accusations rendered in the preface to the second edition by its editor and reviser Thomas Johnson. The care bestowed by Johnson in correcting what Raven calls “the errors of Gerard’s book, the misplaced pictures, the confused species, the blunders of fact” and madding much new material made his edition a popular and standard work, which proved of especial value in promoting the study of the British flora well into the eighteenth Century. Yet, the Herball as published contains so much that undoubtedly came from Gerard himself, and its production, even with the possible aid of Priest’s translation, was so massive a task that it seems charitable to credit him with the whole, It remains a valuable source of information about the plants available in western European gardens at the end of the sixteenth century and about the Latin and vernacular names then applied to them.

Achievements

• John Gerard was an eminent botanist with a large herbal garden in London. His best known work is Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes, which became the most prevalent botany book in English in the 17th century.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Herball - Or, Generall Historie of Plantes 1597

Connections

Gerard married Anne (or possibly Agnes), who died in 1620, and by her had five children, of whom only one, Elizabeth, survived them.

Spouse:

Anne Gerard

Daughter:

Elizabeth Gerard

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography