Hendrik Van Rheede - Work in Natural History

Work in Natural History

His work on the plants of the Malabar region had begun earlier in 1674 and it was around 1675 that the draft of the first volume was produced. Since 1660 the Company encouraged publication of scientific work; the documentation of the useful plants by Van Rheede would help in the fight against local diseases. The first volume of the Hortus Malabaricus, published in 1678, a compendium of the plants of economic and medical value in the south Indian Malabar region, was undertaken when Jonkheer van Rheede was the Dutch Governor of Cochin and continued for the next three decades. It was published in twelve volumes and in four languages: Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic and Mayalam. Mentioned in these volumes are plants of the Malabar region which in his time referred to the stretch along the Western Ghats from Goa to Kanyakumari. The ethno-medical information presented in the work was extracted from palm leaf manuscripts by a famous practitioner of herbal medicine named Itty Achuden. The compilations were edited by a team of nearly a hundred including physicians, professors of medicine and botany, amateur botanists (such as professor Arnold Seyn, Theodore Jansson of Almeloveen, Paul Hermann, Johannes Munnicks, Jan Commelin, Abraham Poot, the translator of a Dutch version), Indian scholars and vaidyas (physicians) of Malabar and adjacent regions, and technicians, illustrators and engravers, together with the collaboration of company officials, clergymen (Johannes Casearius and Father Mathew of St. Joseph). He was also assisted by the King of Cochin and the ruling Zamorin of Calicut.

His work was made use of by Carolus Linnaeus. Linnaeus noted in the preface of his Genera plantarum (1737) that he did not trust any authors except Dillen in Hortus Elthamensis, Rheede in Hortus Malabaricus and Charles Plumier on American plants and further noted that Rheede was the most accurate of the three.