Havard, Valery (1846–1927). Medical and Economic Botany. Typescript, ca. 1897. 1291 numbered leaves with holograph corrections. Some photocopied titles laid in, likely not in the author’s hand. Loose pages originally housed in an army-issue field binder titled by hand, bound in buckram with straps. Some light wear both to sheets and binder. Now housed in two archival boxes.

Valery Havard, 1902

The manuscript for Valery Havard’s unpublished masterwork in the field, written while serving in the United States army. Trained as a medical doctor in Paris and New York, Havard pursued independent studies in botany. He was appointed to the medical department of the army in 1871 and served in frontier posts in Montana and Texas, where he first came interested in native edible plants, the subject of some of his earliest papers. Between 1884 and 1898 he served in a series of posts in New York, North Dakota, and Wyoming, where he continued his studies. He served in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, acting as chief surgeon of the Cavalry Division under General Joseph Wheeler during the battle of San Juan Hill, staying afterwards to serve as chief surgeon for the military division. During the Russo-Japanese War he served as medical attaché with the Imperial Russian Army. He retired to Fairfield, Connecticut in 1910 (his wife was from Bridgeport), but he was recalled to active duty in 1917 and returned to Cuba to reorganize the medical departments of the country’s army and navy. For this labor he received the Cuban Order of Military Merit.

After 1901, Havard’s writing focused primarily on military hygiene. But in the 1880s and 1890s, he published a series of articles on botany. He lent his name to a number of species he described during his time in Texas in the 1870s and early 1880s, including the Chisos bluebonnet (Lupinus havardii), Havard oak (Quercus havardii), and Havard's evening primrose (Oenothera havardii). He was co-chair of an effort organized in 1896 by the Pan American Medical Congress and the Smithsonian Institution to institute a systematic study of American medicinal flora, and this we think was the occasion for the preparation of the present manuscript.

Weighing in at almost 1300 pages this monumental work was, according to the author, “the first attempt made in this country to gather all the useful information scattered in American botanical literature … into a convenient and compact form.” Focusing on the spermatophyta (plants bearing flowers and seeds), Valery describes thousands of species, organizing them according to the taxonomic systems of Engler & Prantl’s Pflanzenfamilien and of Britton & Brown’s Illustrated Flora, and using the nomenclature approved by the Botanical Club of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1892 and 1893. The preface notes that the text was intended to appear to a wide class of readers, including physicians, pharmacists, organic chemists, farmers, lumbermen, landscape architects, and “the large class of educated people who study botany for pleasure and recreation.”

A significant achievement in American botanical history.

Select References

Havard, Valery. Botanical outlines of the country marched over by the seventh United States Cavalry during the summer of 1877. Annual report of the chief of engineers to the Secretary of War for the year 1877, Appendix QQ, pp. 1681-1687

-----. List of plants found on the plains of western Dakota and eastern Montana during the summer of 1877 and spring of 1879. Washington : Government Printing Office, 1880.

-----. The Mezquit. American naturalist, May, 1884.

-----. Report on the flora of western and southern Texas, United States. National museum. Proceedings; v. 8 (1886): 449-533.

-----.Distribution of the Buffalo Grass (Buchloe Dactyloides, Engelm.). Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 15, no. 8 (1888): 215–18.

-----. Manual of drill for the hospital corps and company bearers of the U. S. Army. Bismark, Dakota: Tribune, 1889.

-----. Food plants of the North American Indians. Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, 22/3 (1895): 98-123

-----. Food plants of the North American Indians. Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, 23/2 (1896): 33-46

-----. Notes on trees of Cuba. The Plant World 4, no. 10 (1901): 181–85, 181-185, 221-225.

-----. Manual of Military hygiene for the military services of the United States. New York: Wood, 1909.

-----. [Portrait] in L. R. Hamersly, ed. A military album, containing over one thousand portraits of commissioned officers who served in the Spanish-American war. New York: L. R. Hamersly, 1902), 243.

Langley, S. P., H. H. Rusby, and Valery Havard. Circular of the Sub-Commission of the Pan-American Medical Congress on Medicinal Flora of the United States. Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 24, no. 8 (1897): 413–15.

Phalen, James M. Valery Havard, Colonel, Medical Corps, U.S. Army. Army Medical Bulletin, 50 (Oct. 1939): 126-129