Before pharmacology and botany split into separate disciplines, apothecaries trained for years to identify medicinal plants correctly by sight, smell and taste, since a misidentified herb could kill a patient rather than cure them. Chemical analysis, standardized dosing and formal pharmacy licensing in the 19th century replaced this plant-identification craft with laboratory-verified medicine.
Apothecary-herbalist no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
c. 350 BCE – 1600s
Natural history and classification
From Aristotle's animal catalogues through medieval herbals and the first university botanical gardens, biology's core activity for two thousand years was careful description: naming, comparing and cataloguing living things, mostly for medical or agricultural use, with little sense yet of an underlying mechanism connecting them.
What else was happening then
1665
Hooke names the "cell"
Examining a sliver of cork under a microscope he had built himself, Robert Hooke saw tiny walled compartments and called them "cells" after the small rooms monks lived in, publishing the observation in his richly illustrated Micrographia — the first recorded use of the word in biology.
1735
Linnaeus publishes Systema Naturae
Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae introduced a standardized two-part Latin name for every species and a nested hierarchy of ranks — kingdom, class, order, genus, species — replacing the long, inconsistent descriptive names naturalists had used before, a system still in use essentially unchanged.
Where that work lives now
The scientist who studies life itself, from Linnaeus naming species by hand to editing genomes with CRISPR, still testing every idea against a living organism.
🧬 Biologist →