Reviving David Hosack, the nation’s founding doctor

Victoria Johnson's book on David Hosack was a National Book Award finalist.

A painting of David Hosack.

Victoria Johnson

By JOYCE CORRIGAN 

Quick poll: who’s ever heard of David Hosack? Dubbed America’s “Founding Doctor” by historians, until recently he’d been plagued by obscurity for 200 years — not unlike the yellow fever that haunted his late-18th century New York. Yes, he merits a reference in the musical “Hamilton” — but isn’t mentioned by name. (With an ardent ambition to match his prodigious talents, Hosack would have had a bone to pick with Lin-Manuel Miranda.)

Hosack was, in fact, the attending physician in the fateful duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. He’d been a personal doctor and friend to both, as well as to the most prominent politicians, writers, lawyers and civic leaders of his day. In addition to smallpox, drowning (who could swim?) and childbirth-related deaths, doctors of Hosack’s era routinely treated injuries resulting from duels — by then illegal in New York City but still practiced by the upper classes.

Yet Hosack’s contributions went far beyond medicine. It took author and Hunter College urban policy professor, Victoria Johnson, to resuscitate the legacy of this wildly charismatic figure with her “American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist. On March 4, Johnson spoke at the Bedford Playhouse, hosted by the John Jay Homestead Scholars Committee.

Known as an electrifying lecturer, Hosack was, in fact, “a quiet hero,” claimed Johnson. “His two passions were medicine and botany, and he had revolutionary ideas about both. He was also an art patron — supporting the legendary Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School, at a critical moment in the young artist’s career.”

“Hosack never achieved the renown of many of his Age of Enlightenment peers because his legacy was not bound to a single defining breakthrough, like, say, the discovery of the smallpox vaccine,“ Johnson reasoned. “His primary devotion was to his fellow citizens, and so, straddling the worlds of medicine, botany, and public health, he went about establishing the institutions that have made New York City an internationally recognized center for science and scientific education.”

A graduate of Yale and Columbia, where she earned her Ph.D. in sociology, Johnson first stumbled upon Hosack in 2016 while a Mellon Visiting Scholar at the New York Botanical Garden’s Humanities Institute.

“I’ve always had a keen interest in America’s great cultural institutions,” she recalled. “Suddenly, I’m reading about the NYBG’s own precursor — Hosack’s Elgin Botanic Garden, founded in 1801 on the 20 acres that are now Rockefeller Center. It was like I was struck by lightning — I had to know everything about him.”

Named after his father’s Scottish hometown, Hosack’s Elgin Garden was the first public botanical garden in the U.S., primarily intended for medical and scientific education. Hosack personally financed it and collected hundreds of plants and trees, both native and exotic for public enjoyment. Incidentally, his timely use of Peruvian bark saved the life of Hamilton’s elder son, Philip, who had been suffering from a severe, mysterious fever.

“While Elgin was immediately popular — Hamilton visited often — it was short-lived,” Johnson said. “It was too ahead of its time; science was moving toward chemical-lab pharmaceuticals. Still, Hosack created the first generation of professional botanists, some of whom went on to found the New York Botanical Garden.” 

Today, the botanical garden is a cultural cornerstone regarded as one of the world’s most prestigious for its cutting-edge research, and vast living and preserved plant collections.

Hosack also helped found the New York Lying-In Hospital in 1799, advocating for improved maternal care and contributed extensively to the New-York Historical Society’s scientific and medical collections. At Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, he radically modernized the curriculum, while at what was then called New York Hospital (now New York-Presbyterian), he promoted sanitation, professional standards, and innovative patient care. Each effort left a lasting imprint on the city’s medical, scientific, and cultural landscape.

“We love telling the stories of Jay’s colleagues in the Early Republic,” said Melissa Vail, chair of the John Jay Scholars Committee. “It was still a small country, and the power brokers were all tightly connected — through friendship, marriage, universities, and shared professions. Politics, agriculture, medicine, and art — everything that helped a young nation grow.”

Invariably, the JJ Scholars connect their guest’s subject matter and Jay. With Hosack, they were offered a shining example — if a bloody one. During the doctors’ riots of 1788, angry mobs stormed Columbia’s medical school, smashing windows and battering doors, enraged by rumors that students were exhuming bodies for dissection — a common but illegal practice in those days necessary for hands-on surgical training. Hosack, then a Columbia professor, rushed to defend his students and was struck in the head with a rock. John Jay, a leading civic figure and Columbia trustee, arrived to restore order and was similarly struck, yet pressed on until the militia broke up the crowd. The following year the 1789 New York Anatomy Act legalized medical students’ study of the cadavers of executed criminals and unclaimed deceased prisoners. 

“Both Jay and Hosack were becoming familiar with new theories of disease, surgeries and treatments, which were far more effective than the existing ones,” Vail said. “But defending progress where superstition and public mistrust prevailed was often dangerous.” 

“The title ‘American Eden’ came to me almost as soon as I started my research,” Johnson recalled. “For Hosack, the idea of a lush botanical garden and America’s new republic were intertwined. Everything grew in abundance here. And everything was possible.” 

In those feverish Early Republic years — with rival political factions, fierce debates about the Constitution, and fear of foreign influence — Hosack worked to fortify the nation’s scientific foundation and remind his fellow citizens that America’s exceptional botanical richness was their providential inheritance, ever capable of preserving and restoring life. He couldn’t have written a more effective prescription.