Isaac Bayley Balfour, Sphagnum Moss, and the Great War (1914–1918)

Archives of natural history 42.1 (2015): 1–9 Edinburgh University Press DOI: 10.3366/anh.2015.0274 # The Society for the History of Natural History www.euppublishing.com/journal/anh Isaac Bayley Balfour, Sphagnum moss, and the Great War (1914–1918) P. G. AYRES 13 Vanbrugh Close, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1YB (e-mail: [email protected]). ABSTRACT: Isaac Bayley Balfour was a systematist specializing in Sino-Himalayan plants. He enjoyed a long and exceptionally distinguished academic career yet he was knighted, in 1920, “for services in connection with the war”. Together with an Edinburgh surgeon, Charles Cathcart, he had discovered in 1914 something well known to German doctors; dried Sphagnum (bog moss) makes highly absorptive, antiseptic wound dressings. Balfour directed the expertise and resources of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (of which he was Keeper), towards the identification of the most useful Sphagnum species in Britain and the production of leaflets telling collectors where to find the moss in Scotland. By 1918 over one million such dressings were used by British hospitals each month. Cathcart’s Edinburgh organisation, which received moss before making it into dressings, proved a working model soon adopted in Ireland, and later in both Canada and the United States. KEY WORDS : First World War – Charles Walker Cathcart – wound dressings – Edinburgh. BALFOUR’S BOTANY In the period from 1888 to 1922, when Isaac Bayley Balfour (1853–1922) was Regius Professor of Botany in the University of Edinburgh, and also Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (The Queen’s Botanist in Scotland), new plants flooded into Britain from its empire and from the Far East. Balfour successfully made Edinburgh pre-eminent in the study of Sino-Himalayan plants; it was to him that plant hunters such as George Forrest, Frank Kingdon Ward, and Reginald Farrar sent their most prized collections. Although an excellent all-round botanist, his speciality was systematics, in particular “working out” species of the genera Rhododendron and Primula (Anonymous 1922; Bennell and Lamond 1991). It was Balfour’s word which often helped decide whether or not new plant-hunting expeditions should be funded. Among his last acts he helped establish a reserve for rhododendrons in Glenbranter Forest, Argyll, near Loch Lomond, and one for alpines in Caenlochan Forest, Angus (Prain 1924). The latter is now included within a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh was quite literally Balfour’s home, for his father, John Hutton Balfour (1808–1884), was Keeper when Isaac was growing up. Isaac was able to roam freely through the Garden, learning from its gardeners the practical skills of horticulture. When a young man, he voyaged to two tropical islands in the Indian Ocean, in 1874 studying the flora of Rodrigues, an island east of Madagascar, and in 1879 visiting Socotra, an island east of the Horn of Africa (Farmer 1923). He made his first botanical collections, bringing back from Socotra over 200 previously unknown plants including the endemic Begonia socotrana which, when crossed with B. tuberosus, produced cultivars 2 I. B. BALFOUR, SPHAGNUM AND THE GREAT WAR (1914–1918) highly valued for their ability to flower in all seasons. On the basis of his floral studies he was able to argue that Socotra was once connected to the Horn. Balfour went on to hold university chairs in Glasgow, Oxford and Edinburgh. With his great friend Frederick Orpen Bower, who succeeded him as Professor of Botany in Glasgow, he attempted in his later years to exert control over contemporary botany and botanists, working assiduously to influence appointments ranging from professorships in Aberdeen and in Oxford (Boney 2001), to the Presidency of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Boney 1995). In the latter case, he, Bower, and Balfour’s ex-student John Bretland Farmer (then Professor at Imperial College, London) lobbied successfully to prevent Mrs Agnes Arber succeeding Miss E. (“Becky”) Saunders as President of Section K (Botany) at the 1921 meeting – one woman after another was more than they could tolerate. Arber withdrew and Dukinfield Henry Scott (Keeper of the Jodrell Laboratory, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew), an old ally of Balfour and Bower, was made President. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1884, and with many subsequent honours, Balfour was a most eminent botanist by the standards of any age – let alone an age in which there were few such professionals. It seems unsurprising, therefore, that such an outstanding career should be honoured by the King and his nation. Balfour was duly knighted in 1920 yet, remarkably, not for services to botany. On 30 March 1920, in a supplement to the London gazette (Anonymous 1920: 3758) it was announced that “The King has been graciously pleased” to invest Isaac Bayley Balfour with the order of Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE) “for services in connection with the war”. His name was grouped alongside those of a brigadier general, various masters of merchant ships, and a petroleum adviser to the War Office. Why? The answer has to do with the adoption by military hospitals during the Great War of wound dressings that were made from Sphagnum (bog moss); dressings which through their absorptive and antiseptic properties saved countless limbs and even lives. By 1918 one million dressings per month were being sent out from Britain not just to hospitals at the Western Front but to theatres of war as distant as Egypt and Mesopotamia, Serbia and Russia (Porter 1917; Nichols 1920). Beginning with an article in The Scotsman newspaper in November 1914, it was Balfour and an Edinburgh surgeon, Charles Walker Cathcart, who persuaded the authorities to use Sphagnum. This aspect of Balfour’s life has not previously been described. THE BALFOURS AND MEDICINE Until late in the nineteenth century botany in universities formed part of the medical curriculum, students being taught to recognize plants as materia medica. Many of those who in later life became leaders of academic botany held degrees in medicine. The tradition in the Balfour family of mixing botany and medicine was, thus, not unusual; what marked out the Balfours was that they combined botany and military medicine. Balfour’s grandfather, Andrew, had served for a time as an assistant-surgeon in the 1st Hampshire Regiment (Prain 1924). Balfour’s father, John Hutton, was indentured as an apprentice with Sir George Ballingall, Professor of Military Surgery at Edinburgh University, before he qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1831, and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1833. Andrew had been a keen amateur botanist, a love he passed to his son who, while a student at Edinburgh, had attended the botanical lectures of Professor Robert Graham. Soon after John I. B. BALFOUR, SPHAGNUM AND THE GREAT WAR (1914–1918) 3 Hutton Balfour returned to Edinburgh in 1834 as assistant to the Professor of Military Surgery, he began in his spare time an ambitious survey of the vegetation of the Scottish hills. He helped to found both the Botanical Society of Edinburgh and the Botanical Society Club. In 1840 he became Lecturer on Botany in the extra-mural School of Medicine. After a spell as Professor of Botany at Glasgow University, he returned to Edinburgh where he held the Regius Chair of Botany, and was Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden (posts subsequently held by his son, Isaac Bayley Balfour) (Turner 1933). Isaac Bayley Balfour also studied medicine, his first medical session being in 1874 and his last in 1877. Most significantly, since Joseph Lister was the father of antiseptic technique, in the winter session of 1875–1876 Balfour worked as Lister’s “dresser” – an assistant with special responsibility for tending the wounds of patients – on surgical wards at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Also studying medicine at Edinburgh at broadly the same time (1873–1878) was Charles Walker Cathcart. It seems highly likely that the two met during this period. Letters prove they were in contact shortly afterwards, in 1891–1892, when they corresponded about Cathcart’s interest in (de-lignified) wood wool as a cheap substitute for cotton wool in wound dressings.1 Wood shavings could be bought for one penny per pound (weight) whereas cotton wool cost twelve times as much (one shilling per pound). At a time when the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary was using 300 pounds (136 kg) of cotton wool per week, considerable savings could be realised. With the advice of Balfour – who in turn consulted William Thiselton-Dyer, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew – both native and foreign woods were compared. As Cathcart wrote to Balfour on 23 October 1891, “Scotch Fir” (Scots pine, Pinus sylvestris), which was locally abundant, was much superior to “Red Wood, Yellow Pine (American), [and] White Wood (Baltic)” in terms of both its softness and absorbency.2 Further trials merely underlined the superiority of Scots pine. Cathcart (1853–1932) was an energetic man-of-action (Macintyre and MacLaren 2005). While a student in Edinburgh he played rugby for his university and was capped three times for Scotland. From 1881 to 1885, he taught anatomy at the extra-mural School of Medicine at Surgeons’ Hall, where, after his appointment to the new Royal Infirmary as Assistant Surgeon in 1884, he also lectured in surgery. In 1900 he was appointed Surgeon-in-Ordinary to the Royal Infirmary with charge of the wards. Already a voluntary member of the Royal Army Medical Corps, when the Great War broke out in August 1914 he was given the rank of lieutenant-colonel and made Consulting Surgeon to military hospitals in the Edinburgh region, an appoinment which gave him the opportunity to test new sorts of wound dressings.

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