Charles Frederic Millspaugh and American Medicinal Plants

American Medicinal Plants was an ambitious work by Charles Frederick Millspaugh, nephew of Cornell University's founder, Ezra Cornell.

Born and raised in Ithaca, New York, Millspaugh studied at Cornell from 1872 to 1875, and then went on to receive a doctorate at the New York Homeopathic College in New York City. An early friendship with the Cornell naturalist Louis Agassiz Fuertes--whom Charles had met while fishing the many creeks and streams of the Ithaca area--nurtured a lifelong fascination with natural history. While practicing medicine in Binghamton Millspaugh embarked on an extensive study of medicinal plants found in the North American landscape.

Thanks to childhood instruction in drawing and painting received from his father, Charles created both the text and the illustrations--180 total!--for the multivolume work that was eventually issued in six portfolios between 1884 and 1887 under the title American Medicinal Plants, and hailed as "one of the monumental American works of its line." With this pioneering botanical study under his belt, Millspaugh became Professor of Botany at the University of West Virginia in the early 1890s, where he threw himself into field-study of the local flora.

In 1894 he became the Curator of Botany at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, a position he held until his death in 1923. During this time he earned wide recognition for collecting rich herbarium collections. The contributions made by his American Medicinal Plants, and his prolific later studies of plants in various regions of North and South America and the Caribbean, earned Millspaugh respect as a taxonomist of New World flora. No less recognized was his administrative work at the Field Museum, where he was known for his ability to translate the insights of field research into brilliant museum displays.