Francis Boott

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Francis Boott, painting by Eden Upton Eddis (1840)
Francis Boott, photograph (1855)

Francis MB Boott (born September 26, 1792 in Boston , Massachusetts , † December 25, 1863 in London ) was an American - British doctor and botanist . Its author abbreviation is Boott .

Boott's father was from England , his mother from Scotland . He studied at Harvard University from 1806 to 1810 and was then sent to England to manage the family's affairs there, in which he showed little skill. Francis Boott married Mary Hardcastle from Derby in 1820, with whom he had a son and three daughters. Also in 1820 he began studying medicine, in which he was promoted by John Armstrong (1784-1829). In 1824 Boott earned an MD in Edinburgh with a degree in medicine. In 1825 he began working as a doctor in London , which he only practiced for a few years until 1831. During this time he also lectured in botany and materia medica at Webb Street School of Medicine (an institution that later became part of St Thomas' Hospital ) . After Armstrong's death, Boott wrote his biography in two volumes (1833/1834) and, since he had inherited in 1830, devoted himself only to literary and scientific studies. From 1833 he was a member of the Council of University College London . In 1834, Boott was offered a professorship in natural history at Harvard University, which he declined due to a lack of knowledge in zoology and mineralogy .

Boott made friends with the botanists Jacob Bigelow and James Edward Smith and the writer Henry Crabb Robinson . Bigelow wrote Boott in 1846 about the successful public ether anesthesia by William Thomas Green Morton in Boston . Boott first convinced the dentist James Robinson to try the new method, which was the first application in all of Europe on December 19, 1846, and then informed the well-known surgeon Robert Liston of the event and thus contributed to the rapid acceptance of the method in the United Kingdom .

Francis Boott was interested in poetry and admired George Gordon Byron , but also the rather unknown poet Henry Kirke White , for whom he had a memorial erected on his grave.

Boott published at his own expense a four-volume tome ( Illustrations of the Genus Carex , 1858–1867) about sedges , a genus of the sour grass family . The fourth volume did not appear until after his death. Another publication by Boott dealt with the materia medica (1837).

In 1819 Boott became a member of the Linnean Society , of which he was first secretary from 1832 to 1856, and treasurer from 1856 to 1861 and vice president from 1861 until his death. In 1835 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Honors

In 1837, the Boottia Wall plant genus was honored . from the family of the frog-bite family (Hydrocharitaceae).

Web links

Commons : Francis Boott  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Author entry and list of the plant names described for Francis Boott at the IPNI

literature

Individual evidence

  1. Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter B. (PDF; 1.2 MB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Retrieved December 18, 2017 .
  2. Lotte Burkhardt: Directory of eponymous plant names . Extended Edition. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin, Free University Berlin Berlin 2018. [1]