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ONE

“A LIST OF MEDICINAL PLANTS”

The Botanist and the Herb Woman

This is an entry from local parish records kept in the town of Autun in France’s Loire valley from the summer of 1740:

On the twenty-seventh of July 1740 was born and on the twenty-eighth was baptized Jeanne, the legitimate issue of the marriage of Jean Baret, a day laborer from Lome and of Jeanne Pochard. Her godfather is Jean Coureau, a day laborer from Poil, and her godmother Lazare Tibaudin, who are not signing.

From the moment we are born we begin creating a paper trail. The only similarity between the infinite variety of those paper trails is their starting point in the same official document: a birth certificate that deals in simple facts. Jeanne Baret’s life begins not with a standard factual record but with this story and, like all stories, it can tell us more than we might first imagine about its subject, the writer, and the circumstances in which they came together.

The unsteady handwriting and archaic spelling of the original suggest that the parish priest, Father Pierre, was old, and so his description of the child’s godfather as being “à poil” (literally “nude”) rather than “à Poil” (from the village of Poil) can be safely attributed to infirmity rather than mischievous creativity in the legal paperwork. Indeed, there was little for the priest to smile about as he contemplated the family’s situation. Not only are there no signatures of any of the adults named in connection with Jeanne Baret’s baptism, but the new father did not even place a cross against the record. What would be the point of such an action at a time when illiteracy rates were as high as 80 percent for men and 90 percent for women in this enclave of feudal culture, a place to which social commentators from across Enlightenment Europe flocked to gaze in horrified fascination at many of the last serfs in France?

Jeanne Baret’s parents owned nothing, but they rose with the sun each morning to sell their labor for that day, their work changing with the seasonal cycle of sowing, tending, harvesting. Despite living in the middle of prime hunting and farming country, within walking distance of the vineyards for which the region is now famous, they starved through the winter when they could not work. As other regions of France traded local tyrannies for a more centralized exercise of the law, Burgundy continued under the immediate rule of local lords of the manor, or seigneurs, who were notorious for enforcing their property rights. The Barets’ seigneur owned the collection of rotting wooden shacks where his workers slept, owned the land they worked, owned the produce they harvested. If his agents chose not to use a laborer on any given day, the man had no paid work.

The modern reader might wonder why families such as the Barets did not simply move on, taking their most valuable commodity, their capacity for hard labor, to a place where conditions were better. But inertia is a powerful force and, prior to the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, the average European country dweller never went more than twenty miles from home. Jeanne Baret’s parents knew little of the wider world, even as its citizens periodically passed through the Loire valley, recording the wretched poverty of its laborers’ lives.

One such observer, the great French military engineer Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, could hardly contain his incredulity at what the ordinary population endured, his description making it clear that the distance between farm laborer and farm horse was negligible: “They live on nothing but bread of mixed barley and oats, from which they do not even remove the bran, which means that the bread can sometimes be lifted by a straw sticking out of it. They . . . seldom drink wine, eat meat not three times a year . . . Add to this what they suffer from exposure: winter and summer, three-quarters of them are dressed in nothing but half-rotting tattered linen, and are shod throughout the year with clogs and no other covering for the feet. If one of them does have shoes he only wears them on saints’ days and on Sundays.” Against this background, it is sobering but unsurprising that those whom Vauban described, both men and women, would typically die in their mid to late twenties (twenty-six years was the average life expectancy of this class).

But when the baby girl born to Jean Baret and Jeanne Pochard was twenty-six, she would be living in a fashionable Paris apartment, organizing papers and preparing natural specimens for the eminent but often unsystematic botanist Philibert Commerson. When Jeanne Baret was twenty-six, she would see Rio de Janeiro, sail through the Strait of Magellan, and stare at the waters of the Pacific Ocean stretching to the farthest blue horizon. What combination of circumstances allowed Baret to go beyond the confines of her parents’ lives?

Baret’s association with the botanist Philibert Commerson--a relationship begun at some point in the early 1760s--undeniably helped to raise her out of poverty. Whether attempting to explain Baret’s literacy or her facility with arranging and caring for Commerson’s scientific collections, previous writers have always maintained that Baret was very much Commerson’s creation. But their assumption that Commerson swept Baret up into his affluent world because he was captivated by some combination of beauty and good nature on her part is as flawed as it is romantic. Even if Baret had been an extraordinary beauty as a child, she was born into a world where nothing childish could last, and where the backbreaking routine of grubbing for subsistence wages would have afforded little opportunity to meet a man of Commerson’s class. (After all, Cinderella had to be made to look like a princess before others could see her as one.) Even supposing that Commerson was seduced by his first sight of the downtrodden Baret, an illiterate, uneducated day laborer would have held little long-term appeal. Given that Commerson had no hesitation in publicly correcting his university professors’ errors in the middle of their lectures, his tolerance for those he considered less capable than himself might reasonably be seen as limited.

So what is the intersection between the world of the mid- eighteenth-century Loire peasant and the gentleman scientist? Baret and Commerson came together at the meeting point between two views of the natural world: a folkloric, feminine tradition surrounding the medicinal properties of plants and the emerging field of taxonomy, which aimed to name and classify the natural world. Baret captured the attention of Commerson because she possessed botanic knowledge that lay well beyond the competence of his professors and mentors. She was an herb woman: one schooled in the largely oral tradition of the curative properties of plants. Herb women were for centuries the source of all raw materials to be prepared, mixed, and sold by male medical practitioners, and as botany crystallized as a science in the eighteenth century, a handful of male botanists did not think it beneath them to learn from these specialists. In this light, Baret was not Commerson’s pupil, but his teacher.



The herb women of the eighteenth-century Loire valley were, unknown to them, part of one of the longest-running battles of the sexes in Western culture. From the beginnings of classical Greek medicine until the early nineteenth century, countrywomen supplied town-dwelling men--who were largely ignorant of how any given species might look in the wild and who considered plant collecting beneath them--with the dried and drying herbs that were a staple of the druggist’s store.

Many male-operated businesses relied on the herb women’s supply: apothecaries, who were general medical practitioners as well as preparers and sellers of drugs for medical purposes; druggists, who were in theory shopkeepers rather than medical men but still dispensed healthy doses of advice along with powdered compounds, dried leaves, seeds, and barks; physicians, who boasted university medical school training and kept quantities of the most useful herbs on hand; and surgeons, who alone were qualified to open the human body or remove its diseased parts, relying on narcotics and plant-based sedatives to render patients insensible. Dentists (then commonly known as tooth-drawers) also needed to supply their unfortunate clients with painkillers, and veterinarians liked to leave salves and potions with the owners of prize animals. And last but not least among an eighteenth-century herb woman’s clients was one of the most surprising innovations of the century: a male midwife (or obstetrician). Prior to the eighteenth century, midwifery had been the exclusive practice of women, and many herb women also served their local communities as midwives. But as the eighteenth century progressed, “man midwives” became the birthing accessory of choice for upper-class women and the aspirant middle classes, though they relied on herb women to supply them with drugs supposedly beneficial to both mother and child. Herb women thus possessed an unrivaled knowledge of the plant kingdom, while male medical practitioners enjoyed social status and power.

Professional in-jokes are rarely funny to outsiders, but an anecdote told by the Renaissance scholar Otto Brunfels provides such a perfect illustration of the centuries-old disconnect between the scholarly pursuit of botany and practical day-to-day engagement with plants that it is worth risking quoting an example of early-sixteenth-century humor. According to Brunfels, a contemporary physician named Guillelmus Copus of Basel gave a dinner party for his fellow physicians from the Paris Faculty of Medicine. Pulling a leaf from the salad, Copus asked his guests if any man could identify the herb. None could, and all agreed the tasty addition to the salad must be some newly introduced exotic. Calling in the kitchen maid to see what she might say on the matter, Copus watched the surprise on his guests’ faces as the woman announced the “unidentifiable” herb to be parsley.

Even if the anecdote is the sixteenth-century botanist’s equivalent of an urban myth, the gender and class dynamic that gives the story its punch line translates across centuries and cultures: the female servant displaying more commonsense knowledge than all the educated men in the room can muster. And more to our specific point: Ordinary women know what plants look like in the field and in the kitchen, while supposedly educated male scientists know only what they are told.

The establishment of the first university botanic garden in the Western world at Padua in 1533 was meant to remedy these gaps in male scholars’ knowledge. Professors of botany and of physic (that is, medicine) were now able to observe the staples of the druggist’s store within the safe environs of college walls, without experiencing the inconvenience and embarrassment of being seen to scour the countryside for herbs they knew only from imperfectly illustrated reference books. In an age of crude woodcut illustrations that only served to obscure identification, when the concept of the petal had not yet even been formulated, even the best herbaria (botanical reference books) were inadequate as field guides. Other respected universities followed suit, establishing their own botanic gardens at Pisa and Florence.

But for a handful of male botanists across the centuries, it remained obvious that the most expansive knowledge of the power of plants resided with herb women, who passed their accumulated wisdom through the female line of their families. Few educated men were willing to swallow their pride and learn from the herb women. In the 1530s, the stupidity of his fellow parsley-eating diners obviously made such an impression on Brunfels that he declared the value of learning from “highly expert old women.” In 1534, the German physician Euricius Cordus also admitted to seeking knowledge from “the lowest women and husbandmen”; Anton Schneeberger, a Polish botanist, declared in 1557 that he “was not ashamed to be the pupil of an old peasant woman.” When these rare declarations occur, they oscillate so wildly between the combative and the furtive that we have to remind ourselves the clandestine product being traded is the botanical knowledge of peasant women.

And this knowledge conferred an incalculable professional advantage. The greatest British botanist of the eighteenth century, Sir Joseph Banks, who christened Australia’s Botany Bay in 1770 and whose collection ultimately contained over twenty thousand plant specimens, signaled his difference from his contemporaries at an early age: While still a schoolboy at Eton, he paid local herb women sixpence for every specimen they brought to his rooms and taught him about. Whatever smirks the visits produced among his classmates, Banks knew more about the plant kingdom than any of his contemporaries, and that knowledge brought him fame, influence, and wealth--not to mention its contribution to Britain’s eighteenth-century imperial trade.

Philibert Commerson belonged to the self-selecting ranks of those well-to-do male botanists who sought out local herb women. But unlike those botanists previously named, all of whom seemed at pains to specify that their female instructors were old, Commerson’s teacher was the youthful Jeanne Baret.

When Baret’s birth and baptism were being recorded in the Autun parish register in 1740, Philibert Commerson was already twelve years old and living over one hundred miles farther south, in a manner far removed from the Baret family’s daily hand-to-mouth existence. Commerson’s birth on November 18, 1727, gave his father, Georges-Marie, his first son in a family that would eventually include seven children. Georges-Marie Commerson had benefited from his own father’s conviction that the law offered a way up and out of the burgeoning ranks of provincial shopkeepers and traders, and he in turn harbored even greater ambitions for his eldest son.

The Commerson family lived in the town of Châtillon-sur-Chalaronne, a prosperous village of just under two thousand inhabitants, nearly thirty miles north of the city of Lyon. For modern visitors to France who are fearful that no place can possibly realize their ideal of French country living, Châtillon (though now over double its eighteenth-century population) is immensely reassuring: Its half-timbered houses trace a medieval street plan that, in combination with a ruined eleventh-century castle and seventeenth-century covered market, is richly suggestive of a long history of prosperity and domestic comfort. In such towns, the triumvirate of priest, doctor, and lawyer constituted the pinnacle of local power and influence: a position the lawyer Georges-Marie Commerson underscored by letting it be known that his clientele included the resident local aristocrat, the Prince de Dombes.