Revolutionary Botany

A handwritten commonplace book from around 1730, small enough to carry in a pocket, holds a recipe for treating "dullness of the head." It shares the show with the College of Physicians' handwritten minutes from 1819, setting out the plan for a national pharmacopoeia.

You walk into the Gross Gallery and follow the line from Linnaeus's 1735 naming system to the first Pharmacopoeia of the United States in 1820, nearly half of whose plants were first used by Native American healers. Benjamin Smith Barton, who gathered that knowledge from Indigenous healers, hangs in an early 19th-century portrait, and his nephew William P.C. Barton's hand-colored plant engravings show the same images printed in the 1820 book. Curator Meredith Sellers calls a colonial pharmacopoeia "WebMD in the colonial era."

WHYY calls it small: books, manuscripts and prints, no specimens. Entry is included with a Mütter ticket ($25 adults), and the museum opens Tuesdays 3pm to 8pm through October 27.