10th February 1778 the death of Carl Linnaeus

by Dorian

Carl Linnaeus

The Bible, Genesis 2:20, states: “And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field”. But actually it wasn’t Adam. It was a Swedish botanist: Carl Linnaeus.

My dad was also a botanist, so since I was knee high to an orthoptera, I was aware that everything had a difficult-to-pronounce Latin name as well as its common or local name. I knew all about the splendid bulk of Sequoiadendron giganteum and the dangers of Toxicodendron radicans. But what I really wanted to do was to go to the ocean and watch the Zalophus californianus basking on the rocks.

At school, young Carl Linnaeus learned Latin, Greek, theology and maths, but he wasn’t interested in that stuffy nonsense (although it would come in very useful later in his life). All he wanted to do was go outside and look for plants. Fortunately his teachers recognised his gift for science and his studies re-focused on medicine and botany at the universities of Lund and Uppsala. In 1729, aged just 22, he published a thesis on plant sexuality and began lecturing to other students. It was going to be a brilliant career.

In 1732 he made a six-month-long expedition to Lappland to study the biodiversity of the region. It would be there when stuggling to name the 100 new species of plants, mosses and lichens he identified, that the idea first came to him of simplifying the existing cumbersome system of classifying and naming living things. In Flora Lapponica, he applied his taxonomic system for the first time and realised it was so flexible and yet so specific, it could be extended to other living organisms.

There are two parts to his system, classification and naming.

Consider the zebra. We say zebra, but to Swahili-speakers all stripey horses are punda milia. But do we mean the mountain zebra, the plains zebra or Grevy’s?  The Linnaean system makes classification very clear.

  • Kingdom: Animalia – an animal
  • Phylum: Chordata– an animal with a backbone
  • Class: Mammalia – an animal with a backbone that feeds its young on milk
  • Order: Perissodactyla  – an animal with a backbone that feeds its young on milk that has a hoof with an odd number of toes; this branch in the tree of life includes horses, rhinos, and tapirs
  • Family: Equidae – the horse family
  • Genus: Equus quagga – this is the plains zebra

Its name, Equus quagga, is specific to that species alone. As with all science, things are fluid; a species’ classification is debated and revised as new data is revealed.

Which brings me to names. Consider the springtime roadside herb with crowns of white lacy flowers I know as keck. But you might call it cow parsley, Queen Anne’s Lace or wild chervil. And if you’re French you might know it as anthrisque sauvage or cerfeuil des bois. Confusing, isn’t it? As he travelled, studied and met other botanists, Linnaeus realised each species needed a universal name. He adopted a system of nomenclature only partially developed by 16th century Swiss botanist, Caspar Bauhin, which he refined and popularised into a name consisting of two Latin words. Keck became Anthriscus sylvestris.

A glorious by-product of Latin names is that they often have an innate poetic beauty and history of their own. The humpback whale Megaptera novaeangliae translates as ‘New England big wing’. While the giraffe Giraffa camelopardalis comes from the Arabic ziraafa combined with a description: tall like a camel and spotty like a leopard.

Linnaeus’ first published his system, Systema Naturae, in 11 pages in 1735. Such was its popularity that by 1768 it was in its twelfth edition and ran to 2,400 pages. The system was soon adopted by the new breed of naturalists including Captain James Cook’s expedition naturalist Joseph Banks.

So why was a system of putting species into groups and giving them universal names so important?

Species can look very different from each other and live far apart and yet still be related (the kiwi and the ostrich). Or they may have evolved similar features because of the way they feed (the thylacine and the wolf). A classification system gives scientists a logical framework based on anatomy and physiology on which they can work to reveal the truth. And without universal names how could scientists all over the world study species unambiguously and meaningfully?

Linnaeus’ classification system enabled him to think about food-chains and the interdependence of life. It wasn’t until Darwin that the complex and beautiful tree of life would begin to be explored in more detail. It would even help shed light on our own origins.

[Written by Jane Tomlinson]

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10th February 1855 A Racist Vivisector at the Foundations of Gynaecology

by Dorian

The Butcher of Central Park

On this day back in 1855, the Woman’s Hospital in New York City was founded. This was the first hospital in the world to be established for conditions specific to women, and from this beginning the study and discovery of treatments for childbirth injuries, non-malignant and cancerous tumours and female infections would eventually emerge. While On This Deity applauds the inception of much-needed bespoke medical care for women, this is oddly not a day to celebrate – for the founder of the Woman’s Hospital, J. Marion Sims, was a misogynistic and racist butcher who secretly subjected scores of underprivileged women to excruciatingly painful and sadistic medical experiments.

The so-called “Father of Gynaecology”, Sims became world famous and lauded by his peers for pioneering reparative surgery for vesico-vaginal fistulas – a debilitating and embarrassing injury resulting from prolonged and traumatic childbirth. But the driving force behind his discovery was not compassion for womankind. No. Sims was in fact a self-serving sadist who preyed upon the poorest and most vulnerable women, putting them through unimaginable agonies, to further his own career.

Sims first noticed the gap in the female surgical market when, as a slave owner in South Carolina, his female slaves became good for nothing after suffering traumatic childbirth. With other local ‘masters’ complaining of similar losses of productivity, Sims set out to resolve this white man’s inconvenience.

In 1845, he constructed a makeshift hospital in his backyard and inaugurated a series of gynaecological operations on countless enslaved African women who had no choice but to comply. Three women in particular –Anarcha, Betsy and Lucy – were singled out by Sims as his favoured guinea pigs; 17-year-old Anarcha was subjected to thirty-four experimental operations for a prolapsed uterus. These experiments were often performed with male spectators present, without any respect for female modesty. And, unbelievably, Sims denied his victims the benefit of anaesthesia. “None but a woman could have borne the pain,” Sims conceded, exposing his rampant misogyny. He would expose himself further still as a racist human vivisector when he declared black women “endured pain as well as dogs or rabbits do.”

For four long years, Sims subjected his victims to endless painful, undignified experiments. Many of these women died from infection; indeed, so alarming were his methods that several of Sims’ medical peers and even his own family urged him to stop experimenting. But Sims, believing his was a ‘divine mission,’ refused to quit. When he ran out of female slaves, he simply ‘rented’ more. “I am going on with this series of experiments to the end,” Sims insisted. “It matters not what it costs.”

By 1853, Sims perfected his reparative procedure and moved to New York to advance his career. He never admitted publicly that he’d experimented on slaves and, in the woodcuts that accompanied his lectures, deceptively portrayed his earlier patients as white women. After convincing a group of philanthropic New York women that his motives were sincere and securing their financial support, Sims opened the Woman’s Hospital on 10th February 1855. His new wealthy white patients were grateful beneficiaries of his surgical discoveries, with the advantage of anaesthesia of course. But there was no such relief for his new guinea pigs. In the early years of the Woman’s Hospital, Sims continued his anaesthesia-free experiments on destitute Irish women – including such barbaric procedures as clitoridectomies and ovariotomies – before an audience of male observers. Mary Smith, like Anarcha, was subjected to over thirty operations.

In 1894, a year after his death, a statue of J. Marion Sims was erected in New York’s Central Park. That this proto Josef Mengele should be the first physician in the United States to receive such an honour is an offense to the countless women he butchered. The quest for medical advancement can never never ever be justified by such barbaric inhumanity.

And so, on this anniversary of the founding of the Woman’s Hospital, we salute the unsung heroines Anarcha, Betsy, Lucy, Mary Smith and all the nameless women who suffered so tragically at the hands of J. Marion Sims.

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