Unsung Hero: Dr. David Hosack and the Medicinal Garden

Where Rockefeller Center stands now in midtown Manhattan was once the location of one of the outstanding medical facilities of the immediate post-colonial era. Not a hospital, but a garden. Dr. David Hosack, who also designed the garden at Hamilton Grange, planted it, beginning in 1801. Here is his story, as contributed by the indefatigable Lynne Saginaw (Chair, ARRT-NY Book Review Committee).

Portrait of Dr. Hosack by Rembrandt Peale, 1835
In the public domain; courtesy of www.wikipedia.com

Born August 31, 1769, 245 years ago this week, David Hosack is perhaps best known as the doctor who tended Alexander Hamilton after his duel with Aaron Burr. Born in New York City, Hosack attended Columbia College, where he began as a student of art, but became fascinated by medicine. He apprenticed with Dr. Richard Bayley.

Hosack transferred to the College of New Jersey, today's Princeton. He graduated in 1789 and enrolled for further study under Dr. Nicholas Romayne. In the fall of 1790 Hosack transferred to the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in Philadelphia, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation on cholera. He received his medical degree the following spring, and moved to Alexandria, Virginia, where he opened his first practice.

He’d learned that the best practitioners received at least some of their schooling in Europe, so his father agreed to pay his way to Britain. Hosack attended the University of Edinburgh, where he spent much of his time in botanical gardens.

Shortly after his return to America, Hosack's son died. His wife soon followed, in childbirth. These tragedies, and the epidemics of yellow fever in Philadelphia in 1793 and New York in 1795 and 1798, led Hosack to devote much of his life to the expansion of medical knowledge and education, and to the training of doctors in caring for women and children. He helped found Bellevue Hospital.

Hosack was appointed professor of natural history at Columbia College in 1795, and in 1797 succeeded to the chair of medicine. By 1801 he was a Professor of Botany at Columbia. In 1807 he was named professor of midwifery and surgery in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, later occupying the chairs of the “Theory and Practice of Medicine” and of “Obstetrics and the Diseases of Women and Children.”

Always an innovator, he was one of the first physicians to use a stethoscope, and a strong advocate of smallpox vaccination. Hosack made great progress towards combating yellow fever, and was the first to make an accurate description of its symptoms. He and Nicholas Romayne worked to found several new medical schools. One of his early accomplishments was the merger of the College of Physicians and Surgeons and Columbia.

In 1801, Hosack purchased twenty acres of land in New York for $4,807.00. At the time, the land was in a rural area, three and a half miles from the city limits. Elgin, as it was called, was the first public botanical garden in the United States. At his own expense, Hosack landscaped the garden with a variety of indigenous and exotic plants. By 1804, the garden was home to 1,500 species of plants, the majority of American origin.

In addition to an enormous variety of plants, the garden contained an expansive greenhouse, two hothouses, and a pond for the propagation of aquatic species. It soon proved too expensive for even a man as prosperous at Dr. Hosack to run properly.

The New York Legislature passed an act in 1810 that allowed the State of New York to purchase the Elgin Botanical Garden. Care of the garden was placed in the hands of the State Regents, who did not share Hosack’s foresight. The garden was abandoned in 1812, fell into decay and was sold to raise funds for Columbia.

After his wife Catharine died, Hosack married Mary Eddy of Philadelphia, with whom he had nine children—seven of whom survived to adulthood.

Hosack was the founder and first president of the New York Horticultural Society, the first such organization in America. He was president of the Literary Society and the Philosophical Society, one of the founders of the New York Historical Society—and its fourth president (1820–1827).After Mary died in 1824, he married Magdalena Coster, widow of a friend and mother of seven. The families were combined with success, living on Chambers Street and at a country estate on Kip’s Bay—both part of the Coster inheritance. Every Saturday, the Hosacks hosted a salon for leading artists and intellectuals as well as medical men, and they became known as social leaders in the city. Hosack was a patron of American artists including Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, and Thomas Cole.

In later life, with Coster family assets, Hosack was able to purchase the famous Hudson River estate of Hyde Park, former home of his teacher and partner in medical practice, Dr. Samuel Bard, and there he developed another fine botanical garden. The Hosacks’ opulent home became popular with visitors who enjoyed the beauty of the Hudson River valley, including not only painters and naturalists but the writer Washington Irving.

He died tragically, of a stroke, only days after a fire destroyed his New York property, on December 22, 1835.

Sources: 
Hosack, Alex Eddy, M.D.  Lives of Eminent American Physicians and Surgeons of the Nineteenth Century.  Samuel Gross, ed. 1861.  Dr. Alex Hosack was the son of David Hosack.
Magnet, Myron. The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817.
www.wikipedia.org
Dictionary of American Biography
http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu (website of the Robert L. Brown History of Medicine Library at the University of Buffalo)