Linnaeus’s portrait in the second edition of Systema Naturae
Ten
Loathsome Harlotry
Linnaeus avoided uppsala upon his return to Sweden in September of 1738, aware that even his growing reputation in natural history gave him no prospects there. The university still held only two slots for professors of medicine, and both were filled. Lars Roberg, the professor of practical medicine, was aging but showed no sign of retiring. Olof Rudbeck still technically clung to the chair of theoretical medicine, but since Linnaeus’s old nemesis Nils Rosén had assumed Rudbeck’s teaching duties, that succession seemed ordained. Instead Linnaeus settled in Stockholm, where he hoped to resume his hybrid profession of independent naturalist and private-practice physician. Barring the acquisition of another fabulously wealthy patron like Clifford, this meant setting out his shingle and soliciting a medical clientele.
He was soon miserable. The city “received me as a stranger,” he would recollect. “There was no one who would put even a servant under my care. I was obliged to live as best I could, in virtuous poverty.” He’d expected that an entrance into Stockholm society would present challenges, but not that he’d be summarily ignored as the months passed without a single patient. Had he a less dramatic turn of mind, he might have realized how thin his credentials were: Aside from the practical portion of his medical exam, he had never treated a patient. He had also neglected to apply for, much less pass, the oral examination required for all Swedes returning with foreign medical degrees, rendering him technically disqualified to practice. But Linnaeus attributed darker reasons. “I was the laughingstock of everybody on account of my botany,” he wrote. “No one cared how many sleepless nights and weary hours I had passed, as all declared in one voice that Siegesbeck had annihilated me.”
Siegesbeck was Johann Georg Siegesbeck, professor of botany at the Russian Academy of Sciences and director of the St. Petersburg botanical garden. He and Linnaeus had struck up a cordial professional relationship when the latter was at Hartekamp, exchanging specimens and compliments in a series of letters. It shocked Linnaeus, then, to learn that Siegesbeck had published a pamphlet entitled A Critical Analysis of the Well-Known Linnaeus Sexual System of Plants, which excoriated his work on both theological and moral grounds. In it, Siegesbeck pointed out that the book of Genesis specifically stated that when God created plants on the third day of Creation, “the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind.” He read this to mean they came into being fully formed and mature—the first apple trees materialized already bearing apples, and the first rosebushes arrived awash in blooms. It was therefore ridiculous to attempt to discern the purpose of flowers and seeds, as their purpose was fulfilled by existing. Siegesbeck renounced Linnaeus’s sexual system as extraneous to the Bible, but moreover a moral affront so repellent he called it “loathsome harlotry.” To describe a vegetable kingdom as naturally welcoming “eight, ten, twelve, twenty or more husbands in the same bed with one woman” was to warp the sensibilities of young students, who might be “corrupted by the immorality that had broken out among the lilies and onions.”
Did the bourgeoisie of Stockholm read and agree with the pamphlet of a Prussian expatriate working in Russia? Linnaeus believed they did. “What a fool have I been, to waste so much time, to spend so many days and nights in a study which yields no better fruits, and makes me the laughingstock of all the world,” he lamented, before deciding to abandon botany altogether.
Aha! said I, Esculapius [the god of medicine] is the giver of all good things; Flora bestows nothing upon me but Siegesbecks! I took my leave of Flora; condemned my too numerous observations, a thousand times over, to eternal oblivion; and swore never to give any answer to Siegesbeck.
In fact he would eventually answer, pointedly awarding the name Siegesbeckia to a small, foul-smelling weed. But at the moment he was pondering the best way to destroy his notes and manuscripts, rejecting the catharsis of a bonfire and deciding to bury them instead.
Linnaeus may have earnestly planned a grave for his life’s work, but soon he was too busy to dig one. Compelled to find some means of plying a trade, he stopped waiting for patients to arrive and began haunting the more popular coffee shops of Stockholm, making a daily circuit that occupied his waking hours. He took a great interest in his fellow patrons, particularly men his age or younger, preferably dressed in uniforms or sporting a worldly air. Circumspectly but intently, he gazed at their wardrobes, their heads, and their hands. If he saw what he was looking for he approached them, suggested a glass of Rhine wine, and discreetly struck up a conversation.
He was looking for neither friendship nor companionship, but for loose-fitting clothing, a sign the wearer had recently lost weight. He was looking for irregular patches of thinning hair on wigless heads, and for reddish-brown spots on the palms of hands. All were signs of what Linnaeus called a wound in castris Veneris—in the camp of Venus, the goddess of love and sex, a euphemism that gave rise to the term venereal disease.
At the time, syphilis and gonorrhea were thought to be one disease (the distinction would not be made until 1761), and the standard treatment was almost as horrific as the malady itself. It involved substantial quantities of toxic mercury rubbed into the skin under high heat conditions and/or inhaled as fumes. It was painful, and if patients did not die of mercury poisoning they regularly suffered kidney failure, loss of teeth, facial ulcers, and mental impairment. Its effectiveness against the disease, if any, was often short-lived, requiring sufferers to undergo a prolonged course of treatment. “A night with Venus,” one saying went, “a lifetime with Mercury.”
In Holland, Linnaeus had made the acquaintance of a physician named Gerhard van Swieten, who’d had promising results with a new substance he dubbed liquor swietenii. The primary ingredient was corrosive sublimate, a compound of mercury and chlorine that was just as toxic but more efficient, producing faster results with fewer applications. This new treatment would come to be called salivation, so named because a side effect was an increased production of saliva. But that was infinitely preferable to disfiguration, dementia, and death. With his stock of liquor swietenii and his discreet manner, Linnaeus quickly became the busiest salivationist in Sweden, administering topical applications to upward of sixty patients a day. “My adverse fate took a sudden turn, and after so long a succession of cloudy prospects, the sun broke out upon me,” he reported to a friend in September of 1739. “I emerged from my obscurity, obtained access to the great, and every unfavorable presage vanished.”
Access to the great. Linnaeus’s booming practice operated beneath the acknowledgment of polite society, but it nevertheless gained the attention of Marshal Carl Gustaf Tessin, at the time head of the Swedish parliament and the nation’s most powerful politician. Even more so than Linnaeus, who was beginning to marvel that “alas, almost all the young men…had been infected,” Tessin grasped that Sweden’s wounds in the field of Venus were reaching crisis proportions, and nowhere more so than among the sailors of the Swedish fleet. He moved quickly to scale up the new doctor’s services by co-opting him into the government, appointing him chief medical officer of the Admiralty’s naval base in Stockholm. Just seven months after his return, Linnaeus was overseeing a lucrative private practice as well as the nation’s largest naval hospital, filled with up to two hundred patients at a time.
What proportion of those patients was suffering from what the Swedish navy euphemistically called “the French disease”? That was a closely guarded number, as Marshal Tessin and his administrators sought to minimize the stigma of seeking treatment by surrounding it with a milieu of respectable medicine. To blunt the opprobrium of putting a pox-doctor in charge, Tessin took rapid steps to bolster the man’s respectability as well. Within days Linnaeus was living as a guest in Tessin’s private mansion, administering cough drops and other innocuous medicine to his aristocratic friends, and giving public lectures on botany and mineralogy sponsored by the national Council of Mines. The crowning touch came a few weeks later, when Tessin facilitated the launch of a Swedish Academy of Sciences, organized along the lines of the French institution. Linnaeus was not only welcomed as a founding member, but chosen as its first president. The post was not quite the honor he would make it out to be for the rest of his life—the Academy consisted of six members, the presidency had been decided by a random drawing, and his term lasted three months. Yet it nonetheless capped a dizzyingly rapid ascent. Under Tessin’s patronage the thirty-two-year-old Linnaeus had moved from the furtive margins of Stockholm savantry to its very center.
At last positioned to follow through on his engagement, he married his longtime fiancée Sara-Lisa Moraeus on June 26, 1739, collected his dowry, and procured a house large enough to begin a family. He and Bernard de Jussieu had kept up a regular correspondence since his visit to the Jardin. In one letter, written during his honeymoon, he could not help but brag.
I have succeeded in obtaining quickly the largest medical clientele of this town and I have also been appointed titular physician to the admiralty. I have just married the woman whom I wanted for years to marry and who, if I am permitted to speak this way between ourselves, is quite wealthy; I am therefore at last leading a quiet and satisfactory life.
In July of 1739, forty-one-year-old Charles de Cisternay Du Fay, the current intendant of the Jardin du Roi, died suddenly of smallpox. “All the medical world and all the Academy fought for that position,” wrote a contemporary observer. “It is worth a thousand crowns in salary, one of the most beautiful residences in Paris, and the right to make nominations for all the positions which depend upon it.” Among the few savants not coveting the job was Bernard de Jussieu, despite his reputation as the Jardin’s presiding eminence. Modest to a fault, Jussieu was famously reluctant to even publish his research, much less assume a higher public profile.
If anyone considered Buffon a candidate, it was only as a distant long shot. He’d published nothing on natural history; his reputation at the time was as a mathematician, albeit with a side interest in forestry. He was sequestered 170 miles away in Montbard, uninterested in returning to Paris to campaign for the job in person. Still, he hoped to be considered. “The Intendancy of the Jardin du Roi needs a young, active man who can brave the sun, who knows plants and the way to multiply them,” he wrote to a friend named Hellot. “I am what they are looking for; but so far I do not have any great expectations, and consequently I will not be greatly grieved to see this position filled by another.”
Buffon knew Hellot had also been a friend to Du Fay, and had tended to him in his final hours. He did not know that Hellot was the executor of Du Fay’s estate and had already helped compile the late intendant’s last will and testament. It included an extraordinary codicil: a signed endorsement of Buffon as his successor. Since the person responsible for conveying this recommendation to King Louis XV was none other than his patron the Count de Maurepas, the matter was sealed. On July 26, 1739, Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon was appointed the fourth intendant of the Jardin du Roi.
Du Fay, even in his last days, was no fool. He knew better than anyone that the Jardin remained a controversial institution. The Sorbonne’s long-standing antagonism was being increasingly matched with scrutiny from Catholic Church officials, wary of the unorthodox ideas (such as sexuality of plants) emerging from the grounds, and disdain from aristocrats who found the Jardin’s egalitarian learning model distasteful on principle. A truly effective leader would have to be as much a courtier as a savant, appeasing rival factions at Versailles while retaining the king’s favor and funding. Even before Buffon had written his letter, Hellot had interrupted Du Fay’s dying to discuss a young man far removed from Parisian intrigue, too wealthy to be bribed, whose ruthlessly efficient ascension into the academy revealed a strong strategic intellect. The choice puzzled many and infuriated others. But Du Fay’s last wish, guided or otherwise, comprised a fierce defense of his legacy.
Exactly one month after Linnaeus’s wedding, a letter from Jussieu arrived with news of Buffon’s ascension to the head of the Jardin. Linnaeus immediately began regretting his career choices. “I now grew fond again of plants,” he wrote, at the same time complaining about how the life of an in-demand doctor was beginning to wear him down: “From seven in the morning until eight at night I hardly have a moment to snatch even a hasty meal.” Even though he could now afford to take up natural history again as a side interest, he could not spare the time. Besides, without the backing and support of an institution, even his most earnest efforts would consign him to the ranks of amateurs. “Botany is very difficult,” he’d written in Musa Cliffortianus,
but it is very expensive also, because the earth does not produce everything everywhere, and the various families of plants are distributed all over the world. To hurry to countries far away, to hit one’s head against the borders of the world, view the never-setting sun, this is not for the life or even the purse of a single botanist, and his vigor will fail in these endeavors. The botanist needs global commerce, a library with all the books published on plants, gardens, hot-houses, and gardeners.
With the income from his practice and the dowry money, Linnaeus nevertheless felt flush enough to underwrite a second edition of Systema Naturae, published in Stockholm and dedicated to his political patron Tessin. Although he insisted in the introduction that “I was obliged to publish at the instigation of the audience” (i.e., by popular demand), he also seemed to be wrapping up the project. “I have added many things in the entire kingdom of Nature, especially the species of Quadrupeds and the names of Swedish Animals,” he wrote. “Farewell.”
Physically half the size of the original but larger in scope, the seventy-eight-page second edition included anteaters alongside the sloths, monkeys, apes, and humans in the order Anthropomorpha. Far more significantly, the description of the species Homo now included the phrase homo variat: Man varies. What followed were four fateful entries:
Europaeus albus (White European)
Americanus rubescens (Red American)
Asiaticus fuscus (Tawny Asian)
Africanus niger (Black African)
A slightly different version of these terms had appeared in the first edition, but in highly abbreviated form and type so small it was difficult to discern what the author meant by them. Now the import was clear: Humans had exactly four variations, correlated to skin color and geographic origin.
Why four? It’s been argued that Linnaeus was straining for symmetry, attempting to add gravitas to his work by aligning it with the then-accepted medical doctrine originating with Hippocrates, namely that the body held four liquids, or “humors”—white phlegm, red blood, yellow bile, and black bile. Physicians regularly diagnosed illness as an imbalance of these humors. A patient lacking energy was “phlegmatic” from an excess of phlegm, a depressed one “melancholic” from an abundance of melanic (black) bile. But Linnaeus himself drew no direct parallels, and at any rate this particular color-coding was jarringly different from other widespread conceptions of human ethnicity. Several languages had adopted versions of the Portuguese word negro to signify African origin or descent, but that usage only began to emerge in the mid-1500s; prior to that a common descriptor was ethiop, from a Greek word meaning both “fiery-looking” and “sunburned.” Documents dating back to 1387 employ the Middle English word blewmane, alternately spelled bloman or bleuman, as well as references to Africa as blewmen londe. Contemporaries of Chaucer had perceived darkened coloration not as black but as shades of blue. Linnaeus’s audience in 1740 was familiar with the usage of niger (one of several Latin words for “dark” or “black”), but the idea that all Europeans were uniformly albus, white, was far from given. In 1684, for instance, the French Journal of Savants had noted that Egyptians and Indians “are not blacker than many Spaniards,” and that skin color therefore “did not seem sufficient to comprise a particular species.”
More readers still were likely puzzled by Linnaeus’s corralling of Asian ancestry into the category of fuscus—“tawny,” or dark yellow. In his Travels, first published in 1302, Marco Polo described both Chinese and Japanese as bianca, or white. In the 1330s, Odoric of Pordenone, a Franciscan missionary in southern China, characterized his hosts as “beautiful in body” (di corpo belli) with pale (pallidi) skin. Tomé Pires, a Portuguese apothecary who ventured as far south as Malaysia in 1512, was emphatic that the Chinese were “white like us,” comparing the males to Germans and the females to Spaniards. When the first Japanese diplomatic delegation arrived in Europe in 1585, observers described them as variously pale, olive, and “the color of Africans.” That same year, Juan González de Mendoza, another missionary to China, reported that while “they of the most inward provinces are white people” and “some [were] more white than others, as they draw into the cold countrie,” other Chinese manifested a range of skin tones from fair to “Moorish” dark and even verdinegroes, a darkish green. Despite the broadness of this spectrum (“it is a strange thing to see, the strange and great difference betwixt the colors of the dwellers of this kingdom”), yellow was not included—except in an early English translation, which in one instance mistakenly rendered Mendoza’s rubio (blonde, fair) as “more yealow…like unto the Almans [Germans].” Even that “yellow” was in the context of reassuring Europeans that Asian skin looked much like theirs.
“Man varies,” Linnaeus had written, at the same time providing almost no variety at all. Europaeus albus, Americanus rubescens, Asiaticus fuscus, and Africanus niger were four segregations of humanity, drawn with broad permanent strokes that would later be encoded as race.
While Linnaeus was putting the finishing touches on his second edition, news arrived of the death of eighty-year-old Olof Rudbeck, Uppsala University’s long-serving professor of botany, whose patronage Linnaeus had briefly enjoyed before being displaced by Rosén. The successorship was all but guaranteed to his old nemesis, but Linnaeus decided to pose a challenge by applying anyway. He lost, and decisively: Rosén emerged not only as the new professor but as head of the medical department. “Rosén, who cannot even recognize a nettle, has received Rudbeck’s post,” Linnaeus complained to a friend. “That’s the way things are going here.”
In his new role of department head, Rosén appears to have greased the wheels for the exit of the remaining elderly professor Lars Roberg, encouraging him to retire—something he was understandably reluctant to do, as Uppsala medical professors had no pension while alive. (After their death, their widows received a small stipend paid entirely in corn.) Rosén’s motives were less than benign: He wanted to claim some of Roberg’s duties as his own, particularly the teaching of anatomy.
Linnaeus put himself forward for this second professorship, even though he had no real interest in it—his heart was in botany, not anatomy—and he knew Rosén would do his best to block the candidacy, which he promptly did. Rosén demanded that his rival publicly demonstrate his command of Latin, even though Linnaeus had been publishing in Latin for years. And when Wallerius, another candidate for the job, decided to mount a public attack on Linnaeus by publishing a thesis, Rosén unabashedly sought to legitimize him by presiding over a reading of the thesis on campus.
Wallerius’s thesis, entitled Twice Ten Medical Theses because it launched twenty separate attacks against Linnaeus, backfired spectacularly. Even those previously neutral on the appointment were dismayed by the overkill of Wallerius’s tirades, and by Rosén having allowed the spectacle to happen in the first place. Students sympathetic to Linnaeus brought the event to a raucous end by shouting, standing on chairs, and rushing the lectern to tear the offending text into pieces. Back in Stockholm, Linnaeus’s political patron Tessin took note of the uproar and seized the opportunity. On May 5, after parliamentarians in the Rikstag had denounced and censured university leadership for permitting the event, Sweden’s King Frederick I signed a certificate of appointment. The job belonged to Linnaeus.
It was not, however, a job he particularly wanted. On November 3, Linnaeus arrived at the podium in Uppsala’s largest auditorium to teach his first class as professor of practical medicine. It would also be his last. Later that same day, he and Rosén jointly petitioned the university chancellor to reallocate their duties. During a series of wary negotiations, the two adversaries had worked out what amounted to a swapping of jobs.
Rosén would take charge of the university hospital and teach anatomy, etiology (the origin of diseases), physiology, and pharmaceutical chemistry. Linnaeus agreed to teach materia medica, dietetics, semiotics (the study of how disease visibly manifested, such as the yellow skin of jaundice), nosology (the categorization of diseases), and botany. “By God’s Grace I am now released from the wretched drudgery of a medical practitioner in Stockholm,” Linnaeus wrote to Jussieu. “If life and health are granted to me, you will, I hope, see me accomplish something in botany.”
In a return letter Jussieu congratulated Linnaeus, at the same time admonishing him that his primary task should be the replacement of his admittedly artificial sexual system. “You may now devote yourself entirely to the service of Flora,” he wrote, “and lay open more completely the path you have pointed out, so as at length to bring to perfection a natural method of classification, which is what all lovers of botany wish and expect.”
Professor Linnaeus relocated his wife and child (a son, Carl Junior, born the previous year) to Uppsala in March of 1742, then immediately set about remaking the neglected botanical garden into his own abridgment of the world entire. Banishing the grazing cows and clearing the overgrowth (which by now had killed off all but fifty-three original specimens), he divided the new garden into two areas, one for spring-blooming plants and one for autumn-blooming ones. These he subdivided into annuals and perennials, then divided those further still into the twenty-six categories of vegetable letters in his sexual system. The effect was a patchwork of greenery more irregular than ornamental, as neighboring plants grew at different rates and to different sizes. In the rear of the garden he added three ponds of different construction—one to simulate a stream, one a lake, and one a marsh—fringing them with plants native to each environment. Behind these he built two adonis houses, one an orangery and one for exotic plants that could not survive Swedish winters. There was a large stone building on the periphery, abandoned for over a decade and “more like an owl’s nest or a robber’s den than a professor’s home,” as he described it. This he rehabilitated into a proper residence. His family occupied the ground floor and a portion of the second, with the remainder of the rooms reserved for private lectures and his personal museum.
In the middle of the garden, just before the central pond, he installed a marble statue of Venus, rendered in a posture of unembarrassed nudity. It was a subtle nod to his prior success as a physician in castris Veneris, but the creator of the sexual system also intended it as a constant reminder: Nature and sexuality were permanently entwined.
The broad variety of mini-environments in his revamped garden reflected Linnaeus’s ambitions, which were economic as well as academic. In many ways, the discipline of natural history in the eighteenth century was roughly analogous to technology today: a means of disrupting old markets, creating new ones, and generating fortunes in the process. The freshly minted professor did not rule out getting rich. “All that is useful to man originates from these natural objects,” he’d written in the first edition of Systema Naturae. “In one word, it is the foundation of every industry.” European mercantile empires were rising on the creation and feeding of new appetites, flourishing sectors of the economy that had naturalists’ insights at their core.
One of the foremost examples of this was sugar, at the time produced solely from sugarcane. Introduced to western Europe by eleventh-century soldiers returning from the Crusades, the reed that “gives honey without bees” was for centuries an extremely expensive novelty item, imported from India and Arabia in such small quantities that it was considered a spice. Attempts to cultivate sugarcane in Europe failed (the crop required near-tropical conditions), but early test plantings in the Americas were promising: An intriguing percentage of the New World shared latitudes with India and Arabia. The first sugar crop in the New World was harvested in 1501. By 1550 there were more than three thousand sugar mills operating there, primarily on Caribbean islands and the South American coast.
In Europe, sugar went from being a costly rarity to a standard ingredient. This new abundance in turn fueled demand for complementary imports such as coffee, tea, and especially chocolate (which was a bitter substance, usually consumed as a beverage, until the Spanish began mixing it with sugar). In Linnaeus’s day, sugar comprised one-fifth of all imports to Europe—an economic mainstay made possible by botanists, who were the first to observe the crop’s dependence on environment, and to postulate where and how it might be transplanted.
Nor was the commercial bounty of natural history confined to plant life. At the time, Mexico’s second-most valuable export (after silver) was cochineal, a tiny insect whose crushed shells were used to make carmine, the most vibrant and durable red dye then available. Cochineal was in such demand that it was listed on the commodity exchanges of Amsterdam and London, yet no living specimens had made it to Europe—it flourished exclusively on prickly pear cactus plants in the Mexican high desert. Linnaeus would long dream of obtaining such a cactus complete with its cochineal colony, believing that a fortune could be made either by cultivating prickly pears in Europe or by finding a new host plant for the insects. What other dazzling colors might be extracted from nature? What new commodities might flourish under transplantation, either to or from the New World? With the garden as his dedicated laboratory, Linnaeus was determined to find out.