American explorer, botanist, pharmacist. Henry Hurd Rusby was a co-founder of the New York Botanical Garden and founding curator of the Museum of Economic Botany. Between 1880 and 1921, he made a series of expeditions in the Southwest Territory of the United States and in Central and South America. He collected more than 60,000 botanical specimens and described nearly a thousand new species of plants. Three genera , Rusbya Britton, Rusbyanthus Gilg, and Rusbyella Rolfe ex Rusby, numerous species, and the alkaloid rusbyine bear his name. His accomplishments are all the more extraordinary for his being nearly blind from birth from congenital cataracts.

Rusby was born into a strict Methodist family from rural New Jersey. As a boy, he tried several times to run off and join Grant's army as a "powder monkey" in the Union cause. His schoolteacher, an avid botanist, introduced him to the work of Asa Gray and encouraged him to start a personal herbarium. The herbarium won a first prize medal at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 and later paid for his medical education when he sold it to Parke-Davis & Co, a Detroit-based pharmaceutical company. After college, Rusby became a schoolteacher and an active member of the Torrey Botanical Club, which published his first articles in its journal. From 1880-1882, he was an agent for the Smithsonian Institution in New Mexico, where he collected in part with Edward Lee Greene, and in Arizona. The experience so stimulated his interest in materia medica that on his return he enrolled at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. The following year, 1883, he returned to Arizona to study the medicinal flora for Parke-Davis, and rode the new railroad down to Mexico to photograph and collect specimens for the National Museum in Washington. He then resumed his medical studies at New York University, and qualified in 1884.

Three days after Rusby received his medical diploma, Parke-Davis commissioned him to search for drug plants in South America, particularly for sources of coca, whose local anaesthetic properties had just been discovered. Rusby was to secure a large supply for the firm and to source three other medicinal plants – cedron seed (Simaba cedron Planch.), "chekan" (Eugenia chequen Molina), and quinine bark (Cinchona spp.), and any other native remedies or potentially stable drugs. But the shipment, including 20,000 pounds of coca leaf, went missing during a political revolution. Defying orders from the pharmaceutical company to return home, Rusby set out on his own across the continent, relying on whatever medical fees he could command from the settlers and Indians he met along the way. Travelling from west to east, on foot and by boat, he collected 45,000 botanical specimens, representing 4,000 taxa, 20 percent of them new to science, including some important new drugs. The full list of his collections was published over fourteen years, 1888-1902, as a 32-part series in Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, with contributions from Nathanial and Elizabeth Britton, Richard Spruce, and the ornithologist J.A. Allen. Rusby later described his two-year journey in numerous articles and in his book Jungle Memories (1933).

Rusby made six other expeditions in Central and South America. He explored the Orinoco Valley, in Venezuela, in 1893, and returned in 1896 as botanist and physician for the Orinoco Company, a Minnesota-based venture that had been granted a 10,000,000 acre concession in the lower delta. Then, for several seasons between 1908 and 1910, he made field studies in the Mexican rubber forests. In 1917, he was sent to Colombia with assistant curator F.W. Pennell to find native sources of quinine for the troops. After the war, he collected the "fear" drug, caapi (Banisteriopsis caapi), in Bolivia and Brazil, as a potential treatment for shell-shock and other types of anxiety. In 1921, Rubsy led the Mulford Biological Expedition to the Amazon Basin. Designed to retrace the path of his first expedition, it proved too rigorous for him. Although Rusby was forced to return early, the expedition furnished the Museum of Economic Botany with new exhibits and a rare documentary film of the caapi ceremony, which was released later as The Land of No Regrets.

After his first journey in South America, Rusby became professor of botany and materia medica at the College of Pharmacy of Columbia University and eventually dean of faculty. He played a major role in food and drug legislation and the creation of national drug standards. He was also an advisor to the New York Department of Health and the Port of New York, where he imposed controls on virtually all plant imports. As a botanist, he co-wrote the Rochester Code for documenting type specimens and served for many years on the Nomenclature Commission of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His greatest legacy however, was the Museum of Economic Botany, which he opened at the New York Botanical Garden in 1899 and curated until his death in 1940, having assembled about 10,000 specimens of economic plants from around the world, which he diligently classified and annotated by use, morphology, and family.

Rusby was awarded the Daniel Hanbury Medal from the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (1929), the Flückinger Medal from the National German Apothecary Association (1937), and the Joseph Remington Honor Medal from the American Pharmaceutical Association, as well as honorary degrees from the Philadephia College of Pharmacy and Columbia University.

Sources:
L.J. Dorr, 1995, "Plant Collecting Along the Lower Orinoco, Venezuela: H.H. Rusby amd R.W. Squires (1896)", Brittonia, 47(1): 1-20
B. Johnston, 1997, "Henry Hurd Rusby, 1855-1940", Herbal Gram, 39: 57-61
S.M. Rossi-Wilcox, 1993, "Henry Hurd Rusby: A Biographical Sketch and Selectively Annotated Bibliography", Harvard Papers in Botany, 4: 1-30.