John Hope (botanist)
John Hope FRSE FRS PRCPE (10 May 1725 – 10 November 1786) was a Scottish physician and botanist. He is best known as an early supporter of Carl Linnaeus's system of classification, largely because he published very little of the research that might have made him a name in plant physiology.
The genus Hopea is named after Hope.[1]
He served as president of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 1784-6.
Early life
Born in Edinburgh on 10 May 1725, John Hope was the son of surgeon Robert Hope and Marion Glas, and a grandson of Archibald Hope, Lord Rankeillor, a Senator of the College of Justice who was the son of Sir John Hope, 2nd Baronet. He was educated at Dalkeith Grammar School, then studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He took leave to study botany under Bernard de Jussieu at the University of Paris, but returned to his studies in Scotland, graduating MD from the University of Glasgow in 1750.[1]
For the next decade he practiced medicine, indulging in botany in his spare time. With the death of Charles Alston in 1760, he succeeded him as King's Botanist and as Professor of Botany and Materia Medica at the University of Edinburgh. However Hope saw his responsibility for materia medica as a threat to his work in botany, and therefore arranged for the chair to be split: Hope became Professor of Medicine and Botany, and a separate chair of Materia Medica are created.[2]
In 1763, Hope succeeding in combining the gardens and collections at Trinity Hospital and Holyrood to a new, combined site on the road to Leith. He also succeeded in obtaining a permanent endowment for the garden, thus establishing arguably the first ever "Royal Botanic Garden". Though he published only a few papers, and is therefore little remembered as a botanist, he made many early physiological experiments. These informed his teaching, but were not published, and were only discovered in his unpublished manuscripts many years after his death.[2] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in February 1767. [3] He was appointed Physician in Ordinary to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh in 1768.
He died in Edinburgh on 10 November 1786, and was interred at Greyfriars Kirkyard.[1] He was the father of Thomas Charles Hope, the chemist.
References
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Wikisource has the text of the 1885–1900 Dictionary of National Biography's article about Hope, John (1725-1786). |
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