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Feature of the month - December 2008

Prospero Alpini

The physician and botanist Prospero Alpini (1553-1617) graduated from Padua and in 1580 was appointed personal physician to the Venetian consul to Cairo, in which capacity he travelled to Egypt where he lived until 1583. During his time in Egypt he took an interest in the many exotic plants he found there both for their therapeutic properties and for what they could add to the then-existing knowledge of botany.
The results of his findings were published in 1592 in De Plantis Aegypti Liber (The Book of Egyptian Plants). Alpini describes fifty-seven plants and trees, and the book contains forty-nine woodcut illustrations in the style of the pioneer botanist Mattioli, whose work was renowned for the high quality of its illustrations.

Mary Toft
A sketch of Smilax Aspera from De Plantis Aegypti Liber

Alpini’s detailed and meticulous descriptions of the plants he found (and sometimes cultivated) in Egypt corrected many of the suppositions of European botanists. The coffee bush (Coffee arabica L.), banana (Musa sp.), and baobab (Adansonia digitata L.) are among the plants featured in Alpini’s work and which had never previously appeared in any European botanical text. He also noted the edibility of various plants and described the sexual fertilisation process of the date palm.

In the year following the publication of De Plantis Aegypti Liber, Alpini was appointed professor of botany at the University of Padua, and a genus of the ginger family (Zingiberaceae) was later named Alpinia in his honour.

The Royal Society of Medicine’s copy of De Plantis Aegypti Liber is currently on display in the Society’s Library until 28th February 2009 as part of an exhibition on Ancient Egyptian Medicine.
More information on this exhibition can be found in our Public pages.

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