The Doctor's Garden

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 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