The Doctor's Garden

In her stimulating and original study, Hickman turns away from the traditional focus of garden history-great aristocratic and royal estates-to consider more modest gardens, mostly situated on the periphery of London . . . In reconstructing and animating landscapes, now mostly buried under city streets, Hickman has recovered a lost world of medical gardens. -Kate Teltscher, Spectator The author conducts [an] orchestra of varied talents with skill, balancing tales of botanic gardens in Edinburgh and Glasgow with the ever-welcome social observations of Mrs Delany . . . Much of the pleasure is derived from brief anecdotes conjuring up insights into a society of progressively minded gentlemen who took every opportunity to improve the state of human knowledge and morality. -Steven Desmond, Country Life Hickman shows us, in her accessible and enjoyable style, how plants were relevant to more than just the elite and how their cultivation shaped medicine and transformed social relationships. This book offers a timely and welcome insight into a little discussed but significant aspect of garden history. -Suzanne Moss MCIHort, The Horticulturist [Hickman's] astute analysis is leavened with delightful details and fascinating social history...Hickman is also quick to acknowledge the hidden histories, both at home and abroad, on which the late Georgian garden was built. -Katie Campbell, Hortus Winner of the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize, sponsored by The Center for Cultural Landscapes at the UVA School of Architecture This book is a very original and accomplished work of garden history, exploring the British eighteenth-century doctor's garden as an important and neglected site of knowledge creation and dissemination. -Jonathan Reinarz, author of Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell This beautifully written book illuminates our understanding of gardens as centers of medical teaching and research, as sources of experimentation, as places of sociability, and as productive spaces. -James Beattie, co-editor of the Routledge Research on Gardens in History series, and Chair, Garden History Research Foundation In this innovative, impressive book Clare Hickman eschews the traditional focus on the grounds of the landed rich, casting a mass of new light on a rather different range of eighteenth-century gardens. Readable, thought-provoking, and extraordinarily well-researched. -Tom Williamson, author of Humphry Repton: Landscape Design in an Age of Revolution Gardens linked British medical practitioners to a world of science, knowledge, travel, literature, and collecting. In The Doctor's Garden, Clare Hickman cultivates a visionary landscape history of medicine. -Annmarie Adams, author of Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893-1943 Clare Hickman uncovers a vibrant network of medical gardeners. Their plantings, temples, and observatories may have vanished, but their ethos of enquiry can still inspire. - Alexandra Harris, author of Weatherland: Writers and Artists under English Skies