Elizabeth Blackwell's Curious Herbal

Elizabeth Blackwell was born in London in the early 18th century, and was known in her lifetime for her achievements as a botanical illustrator.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:44Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:57Holly Frey?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  A few weeks ago, I took a little trip to England. And while I was there, I took the train to Oxford and I visited the Ashmolean Museum. They currently have an exhibit called In Bloom: How Plants Changed Our World, and I really enjoyed that. And one of the things I saw in that exhibition was a facsimile of Elizabeth Blackwell's book, A Curious Herbal. There's a longer title than that, which we will be reading later. I'm saving it, savoring the long title. So I knew this was a different Elizabeth Blackwell from the one we have covered on the show before, who became the first woman in the US to earn an MD in 1849.

• 3:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  Our episode on that Elizabeth Blackwell came out in 2014. This Elizabeth Blackwell was born in London, more than a century before the American Dr. Blackwell, and was known for her achievements as a botanical illustrator.

• 3:57Holly Frey?

  And if you read articles about Elizabeth Blackwell, including fairly recent ones, it is very possible to highly likely that you will get some incorrect details about who she was and where she was born. Some of these errors actually date back to her own lifetime, and then they were repeated and embellished in the decades that followed. And one reason is that more than a decade into their marriage, Elizabeth's husband, Alexander, became infamous for reasons that we are going to get into. People writing about him naturally wanted to include some details about his well-known wife. He had been born in Aberdeen, so people just assumed that she had two. Eventually, people found an Elizabeth from Aberdeen,

• 4:42Holly Frey?

  who seemed to be about the right age to have married Alexander. He had been baptized in 1709. And this other person was Elizabeth Blattery, who was a daughter of a merchant, and she was baptized in 1707. So their ages seemed to match up. But that was the wrong Elizabeth.

• 5:00Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, and I found this situation very confusing when I was researching this because there were two wildly different stories of who this person was. No explanation for the contradiction. And most of the credit for correcting this information goes to Janet Stiles Tyson, who completed a PhD thesis on Elizabeth Blackwell in 2021. Tyson's thesis points out that there's really nothing to substantiate a marriage between Elizabeth Blattery and Alexander Blackwell. But there was an Elizabeth Simpson, who married an Alexander Blackwell in Holborn on October 1st of 1733. When she finished her thesis, though, Tyson could not verify that these were the same Elizabeth and Alexander.

• 5:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  As we're talking about today, those names, all the names involved, were common enough that it was within the realm of possibility that they could just be different people.

• 5:56Holly Frey?

  But then, in 2022, Tyson was working on an essay to go into a new edition of Elizabeth Blackwell's herbal. She was trying to personally examine as many copies of the book as she possibly could. And that took her to David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University. And the copy in that collection included a two-page preface that had not been in any of the other copies that Tyson looked at. And it was a preface that Blackwell had written herself, and it was dated April 12, 1739. And in that preface, she said that she was the daughter of Leonard Simpson.

• 6:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  So Elizabeth Simpson was born in the city of London on April 23, 1699, to Leonard and Alice Simpson. She was baptized on May 4 of that year. The Simpsons lodged with a shoemaker, who was also named Simpson. So that might have been their relative.

• 6:56Holly Frey?

  In this newly discovered preface, Blackwell said of herself, quote, "I from my very infancy showed an inclination to imitate pictures and to attempt drawing such things as pleased me. Whether this proceeded from the strong impressions made on my tender brain by the agreeable objects I was daily surrounded with, my father, Leonard Simpson, being a painter, or a genius born with me, I can't determine."

• 7:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  Sadly, Elizabeth did not get the benefit of much art instruction from her father, who died when she was still very young. But as she got older, she developed a particular love for drawing and painting flowers and for representing them in her needlework. She was also very curious about the flowers and plants that she encountered out in the world, especially the ones that were growing in the wild. But when she tried to look these plants up in books, she often found herself frustrated and dissatisfied. And this was because, in her words, "the illustrations in those books were often, quote, 'too small and confused to be instructive.'"

• 8:04Holly Frey?

  As she grew up, Elizabeth Blackwell continued pursuing her childhood love of learning about, drawing, and painting plants and flowers. Eventually, she started working on solving that problem of too small and cramped illustrations, embarking on a project of making full-size depictions of plants with each picture on its own page. It is possible that she was inspired by the work of Maria Sebuia Merian, who we have covered on the show before, and who published three volumes of flower engravings between 1675 and 1680. After Blackwell finished some samples of these full-page flower drawings, she showed them to some gentlemen of her acquaintance, who, in her words, were, quote,

• 8:48Holly Frey?

  "pleased to commend the performance."

• 8:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  However, she went on to say, quote, "But this scene of pleasure was interrupted by some misfortunes, which deprived Mr. Blackwell of all employment and so far reduced us that I found it necessary to consider what I could do towards supporting my family." Her friends encouraged her to, quote, "make proposals for designing, engraving, and publishing by subscription a set of prints of the physical plants, which work they judged would be very useful and acceptable to the public."

• 9:24Holly Frey?

  So that Mr. Blackwell was, of course, her husband, Alexander Blackwell. They had gotten married in 1733. There are various stories floating around about the two of them having eloped in secret, but this seems to have been a fabrication that appeared in the early 19th century. Alexander's birth date is unclear, but since he was baptized in 1709, it is possible that he was at least a decade younger than Elizabeth.

• 9:52Tracy V. Wilson?

  Alexander was from a respectable family. His father, Thomas, was a minister who served as moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, as well as a professor of divinity and principal at Marichal College in Aberdeen. Alexander had a brother who was also called Thomas, who was a classical scholar and historian and the author of multiple books. Most sources about Alexander say that he had a university education and studied medicine in Leyden in the Netherlands, but there's no clear documentation of this anywhere, and just no record of his ever earning a degree.

• 10:30Holly Frey?

  As for the misfortunes which deprived Mr. Blackwell of all employment, some accounts say that Alexander was practicing medicine without the qualifications to actually do so, and that after this raised suspicion, he and Elizabeth had to flee to London. That doesn't really make sense, though, since Elizabeth was from London and that is where they got married. These accounts make it sound like the couple had to start over in a place that was new to them, but it seems like they were already in London when this supposed quackery allegation would have happened in Scotland.

• 11:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  The misfortunes that were connected to Alexander's work as a printer are easier to substantiate. About three years before he and Elizabeth got married, he had started working as a corrector at a press belonging to a man named Mr. Wilkins. And then after their marriage, Alexander decided to start his own press, and it's possible that his startup costs came from Elizabeth's dowry.

• 11:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  But the Stationers Guild had a monopoly on printing, and a person had to complete an apprenticeship before they could become a printer on their own. Alexander Blackwell had not gone through an apprenticeship and was not a member of the Stationers Guild, so he faced a lawsuit almost immediately. On July 10, 1734, he appeared in court under charges that he, quote, "exercised the art and mystery of a printer, not having served regular apprenticeship in the trade."

• 12:01Holly Frey?

  Alexander was fined, and apparently, he did not have the money to pay that fine. Two months later, he was declared bankrupt. According to some accounts, he spent two years in a debtor's prison, but the bankruptcy would have allowed him to avoid imprisonment.

• 12:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  Regardless of whether Alexander was imprisoned or not, after all of this happened, it fell to Elizabeth to try to provide for them, and we will get to that after a sponsor break.

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• 14:39Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:20Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:38Speaker 07

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• 17:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  Elizabeth Blackwell's plan of supporting her family and paying off her husband's debts by publishing prints of medicinal plants required her to develop a whole network of contacts and supporters in the world of English medicine, alchemy, and botany. In August of 1735, physician Alexander Stewart wrote a letter of introduction to Sir Hans Sloane, president of the Royal Society, describing Blackwell as the "niece of Sir William Simpson, one of the barons of the Exchequer whom you know, and first cousin to my lady cook Windford, whom you also know."

• 17:48Holly Frey?

  This letter described Blackwell as a "very ingenious person" and said she was embarking on a project to create illustrations of about 500 medicinal plants and have them engraved. It also said that she already had the support of Isaac Rand, director of the Apothecary's Physic Garden, now known as Chelsea Physic Garden, where the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries grew their medicinal plants. Rand had helped Blackwell develop the proposal for this project, which was also being provided for Sloan to review along with the letter of introduction.

• 18:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  Blackwell also had the support of Dr. Richard Mead, fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians, and Thomas Pellet, president of the Royal College of Physicians. Her first prints of these plants were just the illustrations of the plants labeled with their names, but eventually she also started including descriptive text about the plants and their uses and preparations. A major source of that text was the 1721 edition of the dispensatory of the Royal College of Physicians.

• 19:00Holly Frey?

  Joseph Miller, master of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, was also on board with Blackwell's project, and his Botanica Affiniale, or A Compendious Herbal Giving an Account of All Such Plants as Are Now Used in the Practice of Physic, was another major source for the descriptive text. Neither Botanica Affiniale nor the dispensatory was illustrated, so the idea was to bring all of this information under one cover, making the illustrations more useful to people who didn't already have one of these other texts.

• 19:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1736, Blackwell, either by herself or with Alexander, since it's not totally clear whether he was imprisoned or not, rented lodgings at 4 Swan Walk. That was across the street from the Physic Garden, and that gave Blackwell easy access to the plants so that she could draw them from life. On April 27 of that same year, her first child, a son named William, was baptized. Tragically, William died a few days later and was buried at St. Luke's Chelsea on May 3. This was, very sadly, not the family's only loss in an era of widespread child mortality. A daughter, named Blanche, was born in 1737 and died the following year.

• 20:20Holly Frey?

  Blackwell started selling flower prints to subscribers through printer Samuel Harding in 1737. And these serialized sets of pages were called fascicules, and uncolored fascicules cost a shilling each. Colored versions, which Blackwell hand-colored herself after printing, cost two shillings. She produced a fascicule of four prints a week, every week, for 150 weeks, and that gave her an ongoing source of steady income as she was working on this project. Her subscribers could collate all the fascicules and have them bound once they were complete, which means there is a lot of variation among the more than 100 bound volumes

• 21:02Holly Frey?

  that exist in libraries and museum collections today. Most of these are in the UK, Western Europe, and North America.

• 21:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  Four illustrations a week is a lot, especially considering that Blackwell didn't really take breaks for things like pregnancy, or giving birth, or caring for a newborn, or grieving the death of a child. She had to work really quickly. She focused on making sure the outlines were correct, and then she did less shading if she was running out of time. Her production schedule was also tied to what was growing or blooming at the Apothecary's physic garden. She incorporated other research, but the plants that she could draw from life really took priority. And that meant there wasn't always a logical order to the fascicules or the bound copies that were made from them.

• 21:53Holly Frey?

  She wrote of these limitations, quote, "I humbly hope my subscribers will show their goodness in pardoning these defects, and that my good friends, who were anyways helpful to me in carrying on this work, will accept my most hearty thanks. If it should please God to give my life and health, I shall employ my leisure in finishing the plates, rectifying mistakes, and supplying defects that they may be more complete."

• 22:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  Some accounts say that Blackwell's husband helped her with the text of the book, including providing information about the medicinal uses for the plants, or translating the plants' names into different languages.

• 22:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  Sometimes this work is described as happening from his cell in the debtor's prison, but it is not fully clear how involved he was in this part of this production, since most of the text has a clear connection to the Royal College of Physicians Dispensatory and Joseph Miller's Botanicum Officiale.

• 22:52Holly Frey?

  Alexander was definitely involved in the arrangements and contracts for getting the book printed, though. Under the doctrine of coverture, married women in the UK did not have their own legal existence beyond that of their husband. Alexander's signature is the one on formal agreements related to printing and distribution, although there are also explicit acknowledgements that the work was Elizabeth's.

• 23:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  Blackwell likely also had some help with some of the steps that were required to produce these prints, but she's generally recognised as creating a watercolour drawing of each plant and also hand-colouring the printed pages for the subscribers that paid for them to be coloured. She also either etched or engraved the plates that they were printed from. Engraving and etching are two different ways of preparing a plate for printing by incising the design into the surface. Those kinds of printing techniques are known as intaglio printing, and that's in contrast to things like woodblock printing that we've talked about on the show before, where the parts of the wood that are not part of the design are removed.

• 24:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  That category of printing is known as relief printing.

• 24:09Holly Frey?

  Contemporary sources describe Blackwell's work using the terms engraving and etching almost interchangeably, but these are different techniques. Blackwell's illustrations appear to be etched while the pages containing explanatory text look like they were engraved. Etching is also something Blackwell probably could have learned to do more easily than engraving because of the steps involved. There are documents in which Blackwell mentions using a calligrapher for the explanatory text, so it's possible that she did the etchings for the illustrations while someone else engraved the calligraphy. Regardless, by illustrating the plants, making the plates and colouring them, she was doing three different jobs that were more often handled

• 24:54Holly Frey?

  by completely different people.

• 24:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  When Blackwell had finished 150 sets of four illustrations in 1739, bookseller John Norris printed them as a complete two-volume book under the title "A Curious Herbal: Containing 500 Cuts of the Most Useful Plants, Which Are Now Used in the Practice of physic," engraved on folio copper plates after drawings taken from the life by Elizabeth Blackwell, to which is added a short description of the plants and their common uses in physic. That "the" is of course spelled "ye," which I love. At the time, the word "curious" had a lot of meanings that it does not really carry today, including "made with care," "carefully worked out," or "accurate."

• 25:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  This is Blackwell's only known published work.

• 25:46Holly Frey?

  The printed volumes of The Curious Herbal included an endorsement that she had also printed alongside calls for subscribers dated October 1, 1735. It read, quote, "This undertaking was honored with the following public recommendation by the underwritten gentlemen. We, whose names are underwritten, having seen a considerable number of the drawings from which the plates are to be engraved, and likewise, some of the colored plants, think it's a justice done to the public to declare our satisfaction with them and our good opinion of the capacity of the undertaker." This was followed by the names of nine men, five of them M.D.s. They included some of the men that we have already mentioned:

• 26:32Holly Frey?

  Richard Mead, Alexander Stewart, Joseph Miller, and Isaac Rand. Different copies of her books also contained an assortment of dedications to various learned men who had supported her work or helped her with it.

• 26:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  This herbal was one of the most comprehensive texts on medicinal plants that was available in Europe in the early, mid-18th century, and it was the first major herbal to be published by a British woman. It included plants from the Americas and Asia, places where England neither had or had previously had colonies, which meant there were a lot of plants that Europeans had never seen before included in it. The fact that it was illustrated made it a useful reference for doctors, apothecaries, and others who needed to gather and prepare their own plants, including women who wanted to grow medicinal plants in their kitchen gardens. Herbals were also popular as literature, so Blackwell's readers also included laypeople

• 27:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  who were able to afford something as expensive as a 500-page book for their libraries.

• 27:37Holly Frey?

  While her book was widely praised, including being endorsed by the Royal College of Physicians, there were critics who dismissed it for not including new information. While it was true that most of the text came from two well-established references, neither of those books had been illustrated.

• 27:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  We will get to Elizabeth Blackwell's life after finishing her book after a sponsor break.

• 28:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane, navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends

• 28:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  proving that queer joy only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 29:04Speaker 07

  Okay, chicken nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped, and they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old chicken nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new chicken nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better chicken nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option, too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating U.S. restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself.

• 29:47Speaker 07

  This new chicken nugget, reinvented based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and Sauces today.

• 29:59Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 31:42Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 32:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  Sources are contradictory when it comes to Alexander Blackwell's debt, bankruptcy, possible imprisonment, and exactly how it was all affected by the publication of Elizabeth Blackwell's Curious Herbal. Some say that the proceeds allowed Elizabeth to pay off Alexander's debts and get him out of prison, but then he kept racking up new ones. Something that is more clearly documented is that the Blackwells had to work to protect the copyright on Elizabeth's work, and that by extension, they were protecting the income that they could earn from that work. On March 9th of 1738, they filed a complaint at the Court of Chancery against eight named

• 32:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  men and, quote, "diverse other persons" for infringing on their copyright.

• 33:06Holly Frey?

  The idea of authors having legal ownership of their work was fairly new in England and was first established under the Statute of Anne of 1710. Prior to that, ownership and copyright had been regulated by the Stationers' Guild rather than by the government or the courts. Bound copies of Blackwell's herbal probably would have been covered under the Statute of Anne, but only because they were in the form of a book. Unbound fascicules would not have been protected, and that's a gap that was closed under the Engravings Act of 1735, also known as the Hogarth Act after painter and engraver William Hogarth, who we have covered on the show before.

• 33:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, so that was just a few years before Blackwell filed this suit. And her suit was the first copyright case in England involving works created by a female artist. Witnesses in the case included apothecary Robert Nichols, who testified to supplying Blackwell with plants to draw, and Blackwell's mother, Elizabeth Simpson, who testified about seeing Blackwell work on the book, and also William Hogarth, who was an expert witness and testified about the work that was being sold by these other men being copies.

• 34:23Holly Frey?

  This case also involved a lot of discussion that grew from law and the concepts it covered being fairly new. Like, Blackwell's artwork was drawn from life, not from her own imagination. Did that fall under the law's definitions, which included a lot of references to invention and design? Ultimately, yes. Also, how could the court account for the fact that the work was created by a woman while the legal ownership was with her husband? In this case, both of the Blackwells were plaintiffs, and the court acknowledged Elizabeth as proprietor of the work.

• 35:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  In the end, the Blackwells were awarded an injunction that was supposed to stop the other publishers from stealing her work. But because she hadn't marked the prints with the date of their first printing, which was required under the law, she was not awarded monetary penalties. The injunction also didn't fully put an end to the infringement. There are things like advertisements and printed warnings from after this point about fraudulent additions of the herbal.

• 35:31Holly Frey?

  If Alexander Blackwell did go to debtor's prison, he was out by 1740. And in 1741, he published a book on agriculture called "A New Method of Improving Cold, Wet, and Barren Lands, Particularly Claye Grounds, with the Manner of Burning Clay, Turf, and Molehills, as Practiced in North Britain," to which is added "the method of cultivating and raising fruit trees in such soils."

• 35:58Holly Frey?

  Did Alexander Blackwell have the knowledge and expertise that would allow him to write an accurate book on this subject? Unclear, but he did get a job working for James Bridges, Duke of Chando's, as Director of Improvements on the Duke's Land.

• 36:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  After that, things get murky for Alexander, and a lot of the writing about what happened next is vague, or contradictory, or both. Apparently, on the recommendation of the Swedish ambassador in London, he went to Sweden, where he got a job at court. This most likely happened while Elizabeth was pregnant with their son, also named Alexander, who was born in 1742. The elder Alexander seems to have worked as both a court physician and on agricultural improvements, and in 1745, he published an essay on the improvement of Swedish agriculture.

• 36:55Holly Frey?

  It appears that Elizabeth was preparing to join her husband in Sweden in 1747, and she sold the remaining rights to her herbal to bookseller John Norse. The Blackwells had sold partial rights to Norse over the years, and this final sale of the remaining rights also included unsold books and the printing plates. This cleared some debts that Elizabeth had accrued that were connected to the printing of the finished book, as well as other debts of Alexander's.

• 37:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  But then on July 29, 1747, probably before Elizabeth would have embarked on this journey, Alexander was beheaded. According to a pamphlet that was published about this that same year, he was suspected of, quote, "being employed as an agent for some courts abroad." Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus reportedly called Alexander Blackwell "a self-assertive ignoramus," and also claimed that Alexander Blackwell had tried to bribe the king to appoint an English counselor. Linnaeus also claimed that Alexander had been having an affair with a married woman, and had supplied that woman with poison in order to kill her husband with it.

• 38:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  Some of this also seems to have been connected to court intrigue and a dispute over the Swedish line of succession, all of which could have been an entire other subject, but I did not get into it because it seemed very complicated, especially since this episode is not about Alexander.

• 38:30Holly Frey?

  And some accounts frame Alexander as kind of hapless, while others make it sound more like he was basically a con artist who was always getting into some kind of shady scheme. That 1747 pamphlet said that when he went to his execution, he knelt down on the wrong side of the block. When the executioner said that he needed to go to the other side, he replied without emotion that, quote, "As it was the first experiment he ever made in that way, it was not to be wondered that he should need a little instruction." In her brief biography of Elizabeth Blackwell, Lydia Maria Child wrote, quote, "This ill-fated man seemed predestined to be unfortunate in all things, save his affectionate and excellent wife.

• 39:15Holly Frey?

  He formed various schemes, in all of which he was successively disappointed." James Bruce, author of the 1841 Lives of Eminent Men of Aberdeen, wrote, quote, "His life was checkered by turns of prosperity and misfortune. He might have been considered ill-fated if that man could be called unhappy that had such a woman to his wife."

• 39:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  We know very little about what happened to Elizabeth in the years after her husband's execution. According to some accounts, she had trained as a midwife before embarking on her herbal, and she may have gone back to that profession. She died in London in 1758 at the age of 59 and was buried in the churchyard of the Chelsea Old Church.

• 40:01Holly Frey?

  Her herbal continued to be printed and sold in the years after her death, and was popular at least to the start of the 19th century. A German-language version was published in Nuremberg by Christoph Tru between 1757 and 1773. Many, many prominent scientists, physicians, and other scholars had copies of the curious herbal in their collections, including Carl Linnaeus and Sir Joseph Banks. Linnaeus reportedly gave Blackwell the nickname Botanica Blackwellia.

• 40:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  Elizabeth Blackwell is the only woman to be included in James Bruce's Lives of Eminent Men of Aberdeen. He said of her herbal, quote, "A man of a generous mind will feel more pleasure in turning over these two large folios with their hundreds of plates, each one of them bearing the inscription, Elizabeth Blackwell delineates it, sculpts it, and paints it than he would in handling an earring of Cleopatra or even a lock of Helen of Troy's hair." That very glowing sentence immediately follows a very long paragraph about how he thought that women should not write books, which we will talk about on Friday.

• 41:16Holly Frey?

  In her 1846 book, Biographies of Good Wives, past podcast subject Lydia Maria Child quoted physician and botanist Richard Pulteney as saying of this book, quote, "For the most complete set of drawings of medicinal plants, we are indebted to the genius and industry of a lady exerted on an occasion that redounded highly on her praise."

• 41:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  And that is the other Elizabeth Blackwell than the one who's probably more famous today in the United States at least.

• 41:47Holly Frey?

  Do you have famous listener mail?

• 41:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  I do. I have listener mail. So this listener mail follows a conversation that Holly and I had about our trip to Morocco. And falling asleep on the bus. Um, and I, I was, uh, in just involuntarily asleep when we were on that bus. And Holly was chagrined at how many people were sleeping because we were missing a lot of cool stuff.

• 42:13Holly Frey?

  Beautiful things.

• 42:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  So Mo wrote and, and said, uh, after sort of setting the context, I laughed so much when Tracy talked about how she wanted people to be awake on the bus. When we honeymooned in Ireland, we took the bus a lot and girl, those buses knocked me out. No matter how much sleep I had the night before or wanted to be awake, I crashed. My dear husband just laughed and told me about what I missed on the drive. Seals, so many ancient buildings, great countryside. We still giggle about it and we try to avoid buses when we travel. No pets, but for pet tax, here is my sister's three-legged kitty Ace. And my friend's Frenchie Carl trying to stow away in her luggage.

• 42:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thanks for all you do. I absolutely love the show and I'm so behind because I love to binge it. Keep up the good work. Morocco sounded amazing. I hope to take one of these trips with you guys someday. Mo. So first, this email was so funny to me and I can't remember if I've already said it on the show, but Patrick and I also took a bus day trip when we were in England. And the bus. I again, was involuntarily asleep. And in this case, I think it was a combination of two things. One, it was, was that it was very warm, even with the air conditioning cranked. We were there during the hottest May in England in the past hundred years.

• 43:35Holly Frey?

  They're having a rough summer already.

• 43:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  They're having a really hard, uh, heatwave summer currently, uh, not just in the UK, but in other parts of Europe. So even with the air conditioning fully on full blast, it was very warm on the bus. And then I also have, uh, a little CO2 monitor in my backpack from back in the days of, uh, like returning to travel after COVID started.

• 44:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  That is just sort of my little, uh, warning of, hey, the, the ventilation in this space. That you're in is terrible and it just lives inside my backpack.

• 44:10Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 44:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  Um, and according to that little CO2 monitor, the ventilation also on the bus was terrible. So we were just, there was not enough oxygen and it was too warm. And so, yeah, and so every time we got on the bus, I fell asleep and I did not want to be asleep. I wanted to see the drive out to Stonehenge. I wanted to see the drive to Bath. I wanted to see the drive into the Cotswolds. I would say I slept through probably 70% of the bus travel time. So, yeah, uh, I, I feel you and you're ruined. You're ruined, uh, Irish honeymoon. Um, and then we also have beautiful cat pictures. Oh, a black kitty. I love them so much.

• 44:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  Uh, and then, yes, a little Frenchy on top of a suitcase trying to stow away on a trip.

• 44:58Holly Frey?

  Cute baby.

• 44:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  So, yes, thank you so much, Mo. Uh, if anybody has tips about staying awake on buses, I honestly, I would appreciate them. As long as the tips are not take a bunch of stimulants because that's not going to help me have a good time on the bus.

• 45:16Holly Frey?

  Yeah, cuz you can't chug coffee the way I can. Is that right?

• 45:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  Not anymore. Then I will be awake all night and then that will compound the problem the following day on the bus.

• 45:27Holly Frey?

  No, no, you keep it going. You gotta keep us in this dream.

• 45:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  Uh, so, yeah, if you would like to send us a note, we're at [email protected]. If you would like to see the show notes to our episode with all of the various sources that we use, that's at our website, which is missedinhistory.com. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts.

• 45:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 46:11Tracy V. Wilson?

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