Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/297

 CLAYTON

CLEAVELAND

infancy, and Elizabeth Loring, who married Dr. Reginald Heber Fitz, Shat- tuck professor of pathological anatomy in the Harvard Medical School from 1879 to 1892. W. L. B.

Bos. Med. and Sur. Jour., vol. xcvii. Biog. Encyclo. of Mass., in the 19th Cen. Met. Pub. and Engrav. Co., New York, 1S79. Private family memorials.

Clayton, John (1693-1773).

This botanist was born in England in 1686, educated there and came to Vir- ginia in 1705, and for the rest of his life lived in Gloucester County, though it is said by Jefferson that he was a native of Virginia. Some say that he was not a physician, but we have it on the authority of Dr. J. M. Toner that he was educated to the medical profession, and was eminent in it. He was one of the lead- ing botanists of his day, giving much time to botanical research and correspondence with Linnaeus, who did him the honor to name a genus of plants, Claytonia, the Spring Beauty, after him.

Whether or not a physician, it is only as a botanist that we have any record of his work. He had a noted botanical garden and prepared for the press a work of two volumes on botany and a "hortus siccus" of folio size, with marginal notes and directions to the engraver in prepar- ing the plates for the proposed work. These were left in the charge of the county clerk of New Kent, and were unfortu- nately burned, together with the county records at the beginning of the Revolu- tion. His long life was chiefly spent in botanical exploration and in the descrip- tion of the plants of the colony, and as a practical worker he was probably without superior in his day, and is supposed to have added more to the catalogue of plants than anyone before him.

The fact that he was first assistant, and later for fifty years clerk of Gloucester County, would indicate that he was not a physician, or, at least, a practitioner. His father was an eminent lawyer, and for a time attorney-general of the colony, which is an argument in favor of Jeffer-

son's claim that he was a native of Virginia. At the great age of seventy- seven he made a botanical exploring tour of Orange County, then largely a wilder- ness, and he is said to have visited almost every part of the colony in botanical research.

This old naturalist was a pious member of the Church of England. It was impossible, he declared, that a botanist could be an atheist, seeing, as he did, the infinite wisdom and contrivance displayed in the structure of the small- est plant. A scientist of world-wide reputation and a citizen of sterling in- tegrity, after a long and useful life, he passed away on the fifteenth of De- cember, 1773.

Numerous articles descriptive of the plants he discovered were published in the "Philosophical Transactions," Lon- don. Several of these treated of medici- nal plants discovered, and others, of the different species of tobacco and their cultivation. His chief work was his fine "Flora Virginica," editions of which were issued from the press at Leyden in 1739, 1743, and 1762, and is referred to by all writers who treat of North American plants. John Frederick Gronovius, the celebrated Swedish naturalist, and the Dutch naturalists of the same name col- laborated with Clayton on the book. R. M. S.

Jefferson's Notes on Virginia.

Toner's Contributions to the Annals of Med.

Progress.

Thacher's Amer. Med. Biographies.

Diet, of Nat. Biog.

Cleaveland, Joseph Manning (1S24-1907).

Born in Newbury, Massachusetts, on the twenty-second of July, 1824, he had his early education at schools in Lunen- burg, Massachusetts and New Haven, Connecticut and graduated B. A. from what is now Princeton University.

He took his M. D. at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, in 1850 retaining his connection with the old New York Hospital on Broadway for three years. While resident there an