Henry H. Rusby MD

I would like to tell you about an Indiana Jones type of scientist. He was from Franklin (Essex County) New Jersey which has now been renamed as Nutley. I speak of an ancestor, Henry Hurd Rusby MD. While in his late teens, Henry explored the then remote hills of northern New Jersey and established an impressive herbarium. He took this carefully preserved and categorized collection to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphis in 1876 and won first prize. The collection was then sold for a sum sufficient to finance most of his education at New York University including the Medical College. While still a medical student he went to Texas and New Mexico in 1880 as an agent for the Smithsonian Institution. This was during and in the area of the unfortunate Apache conflicts and then in 1883 he returned to Arizona to study and collect medicinal flora of Arizona for Parke, Davis and Co. After completing medical school he took a two year trip for Parke Davis to explore remote areas of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Bolivia and Brazil. He especially looked for the coca plant to find a source of cocaine to be used for medical purposes. When finished, instead of returning straight home he decided to travel the course of the Amazon River. His exciting near encounters with death, huge pythons, remote natives and disease left him near death. In fact, his family thought he had died.

Eventually he returned home with thousands upon thousands of plant specimens and many of these are now part of the New York Botanical Gardens. Henry became Dean of the College of Pharmacy at Columbia University. He traveled the lower Orinoco in 1896, then through Colombia in 1917 and across South America again in 1921-1922.
From 1907 to 1916 he served as an expert pharmacognosist for the Bureau of Chemisty of the Department of Agriculture. Several times he served on the revision committee of the United States Pharmacopoeia and that of the National Formulary. Elected President of the American Pharmaceutical Association he received their Remington Medal and similar medals from the societies of Great Britain and Germany.

I think about Indiana Jones because Henry was rugged in appearance and had great physical vigor and considered becoming a professional boxer during his youth. .The New York Times called him a man after Theodore Roosevelt’s heart and he made his last trip across South America at the age of 66 and was known for chasing a robber in the city streets when aged seventy two. He died in Florida at age 85 and left behind over 45,000 plant species, thousands of which were previously unknown.. It is said of him that he was “of the most colorful of the scientific adventurers who opened new sources of plant drugs in remote regions of the Americas.” He was a proponent of the study of medicinal plants on a truly scientific basis (pharmacognosy) and “American pharmacy felt the influence of his active and courageous mind.”He also left behind the book of his major first trip across the Americas in the area of the basins of the Beni, Madeira and the Amazon titled Jungle Memories. He wrote 4 other books including A Manual of Botany and Properties and Uses of Drugs. Any wonder I think of Henry as Amazon Rusby?

Recently an article was published about how a sample of an herb collected by Henry on a trip through the Amazon Valley was found to be potent although stored at the New York Botanical Gardens for 85 years. You can read this story at: www.herbalgram.org/default.asp?c=85yobc

Another interesting article is the one by Mark Nolan as part of the History-Of series and is about Nature’s Medicine-Herbal Supplements. Mr. Nolan traces the history from prehistoric to modern times. Under present day he relates the achievements about Henry Hurd Rusby and his impact on the history of supplements. The article is just six pages long and Uncle Henry is prominently mentioned on page 5 of the article. Read it at:
www.thehistoryof.net/history-of-herbal-supplements.html