American physician and botanist. Millspaugh was the first curator of the botany department of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Charles Millspaugh was born in Ithaca, New York, where his early passions were sports and natural history. The latter was encouraged after a chance meeting with the renowned botanist Louis Agassiz as he was fishing near Millspaugh's home. It was medicine that he decided to study, however, attending Cornell University from 1872 to 1875. Millspaugh was the nephew of the university's founder, Ezra Cornell. He then went to the New York Homeopathic Medical College, becoming a Doctor of Medicine in 1881.
While practising medicine he developed an ever increasing interest in plants, however, and in 1887 published his ten-volume oeuvre, American Medicinal Plants, which featured 180 plates he painted himself. Botany then became his career with his appointment in 1891 as professor of botany at the University of West Virginia; a state whose flora he studied extensively.
In 1894 he joined the Field Museum as its first ever curator of botany, in which position he remained until his death. Millspaugh based the museum’s botany department on donations of plant collections exhibited at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. These were largely economic plant materials including resins, fibres, oils, dyes, spices, medicines and timbers, from more than 20 countries. In four short years he built up the museum's herbarium to 50,000 specimens, which included his own collections from the Yucatán peninsula (1894-1896) and later from the West Indies (1899-1907) and a round-the-world trip (1911-1912).
Concentrating on the American tropics, the museum mounted numerous collecting expeditions from this time onwards, with the Flora of Peru being the last great project initiated during Millspaugh's time (entrusted to J. Francis Macbride). During his tenure Millspaugh published a series of floras covering Yucatán (Mexico), the Bahamas, St. Croix and other West Indian islands, and Santa Catalina Island (California), and produced a succession of taxonomic works dealing with North American Euphorbiaceae. His last published work was the Flora of Santa Catalina Island (1923), co-authored with L.W. Nuttall, which he accomplished after a restorative stay on the island off the west coast of the U.S. Millspaughia B.L. Robinson and Neomillspaughia S.F. Blake were both named after him.
Sources:
E.E. Sherff, 1924, "Charles Frederick Millspaugh", Botanical Gazette, 77(2): 228-230
Field Museum, botany department history:
http://www.fieldmuseum.org/research_Collections/botany/history.htm.
