Flora Unveiled

324 i Flora Unveiled

Malpighi’s interest in plants was sparked by a chance event in 1662, when he was a medical
professor at the University of Messina. While taking a stroll in the garden of the Viscount
Ruffo, Malpighi snapped off a chestnut branch and noticed the fibrous texture at the broken
end. Upon returning home, he dissected the branch under a microscope and was surprised
to discover that the wood was composed of tiny fibers and tubular vessels. Fascinated by the
novel structures he was seeing, Malpighi spent the next ten years of his life making detailed
notes and drawings based on his microscopic observations of plants.
The anatomical studies of Malpighi and Grew progressed in parallel. Malpighi’s early
work was first published in Bologna in 1671 under the title Anatome Plantarum Idea.
Coincidentally, the Royal Society published Nehemiah Grew’s preliminary anatomical
studies, The Anatomy of Plants Begun, in the same year.^6 Several years later, the Royal Society
published Malpighi’s comprehensive treatise, Anatome Plantarum, in two volumes: the first
in 1675 and the second in 1679. In parallel, Grew presented a series of four shorter papers
to the Society between 1672 and 1676. The last of Grew’s papers has since been cited in vir-
tually every book on the history of botany because it broke with the classical tradition by
presenting a new sexual theory of plants.
In 1682, Grew published a compilation of all his papers in his landmark volume, The
Anatomy of Plants. Although he and Malpighi had worked independently, Grew, through
his contacts in the Royal Society, had ready access to Malpighi’s manuscripts, whereas
Malpighi experienced long delays before Grew’s papers arrived by post. As Grew himself
diplomatically acknowledged in his preface, his own research on plants owed much to
Malpighi’s observations. It is also clear that Grew’s hybrid version of the two- sex model was
strongly influenced by Malpighi’s one- sex model of the flower as a plant uterus.

Malpighi’s Theory of Floral Menstruation

During the sixteenth century, Vesalius and other Renaissance anatomists labeled their dia-
grams of the human female’s reproductive system using terms applied to the male geni-
tal system. Ovaries were called “testicles,” Fallopian tubes (oviducts) were given the name
“spermatic ducts,” and the vagina was drawn to resemble a penis (see Chapter 1). By the late
seventeenth century, however, the female pathway had come to be regarded as distinct from
the male’s, as reflected in the adoption of different terms for male and female reproductive
structures.
Marcello Malpighi, like all seventeenth- century physicians, made the transition from the
one- sex to the two- sex model in animals without difficulty, but he held fast to the one- sex
model in plants. In fact, Malpighi went much further than the Renaissance botanist Jean
Ruel had done in feminizing the flower. Whereas Ruel had used the poetic term “womb”
for the ovary of flowers, Malpighi applied the gynecological term “uterus” to the same struc-
ture. In this way, Malpighi advanced the plants- as- female paradigm from a poetic metaphor
to a scientific hypothesis. He went on to compare the style of flowers to the Fallopian tubes,
and postulated that the sepals, petals, and stamens all contributed to seed production by
ridding the sap of impurities.
Malpighi described the process of ridding the sap of waste as a type of “menstruation.”
This idea was not new with him. In 1631, Peter Laurenberg, a Professor of Medicine from