Founders’ Medal Winners 2021-2025

The SHNH Founders’ Medal 2025

The Society is very pleased to announce that our Founders’ Medal will this year be awarded to David J. Mabberley, Director Emeritus, Botanic Gardens of Sydney, Emeritus Professor, University of Leiden, Emeritus Fellow, Wadham College, Oxford, Fellow of the National Botanic Garden of Wales and Chairman of the International Association for Plant Taxonomy’s General Committee for Plant Nomenclature. The Founders’ Medal is awarded for substantial contributions to the study of the history or bibliography of natural history.

David J. Mabberley is a botanist, writer and educator. His researches largely concern the evolution, systematics, ecology, nomenclature and cultural significance of plants, particularly tropical trees, and have always concentrated on those of economic significance – including mahoganies, apples, grapes and, particularly now, citrus – in the light of the devastating disease now threatening the future of the citrus industry. Among a number of international research projects, he is working with Leipzig botanists on a molecular phylogeny of part of the mahogany family; with New Zealand and other botanists on the origin of the cultivated apple, using molecular techniques; and with Spanish botanists on a phylogenetic analysis of plants used by humans. A prolific researcher and world traveller, David has conducted extensive fieldwork across many countries, making significant botanical discoveries and collecting specimens that have contributed to our understanding of plant biodiversity.

He has received numerous accolades for his significant contributions to horticultural science and plant taxonomy, Among the awards he has received are the José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany and the Peter Raven Award (by the American Society of Plant Taxonomists ‘to a plant systematist who has made successful efforts to popularize botany to non-scientists’), both in 2004. In 2006 he was awarded the Linnean Medal of the Linnean Society of London and, in 2011, the Robert Allerton Award for Excellence in Tropical Botany of the National Tropical Botanical Garden, USA. He is a Corresponding Member, American Society of Plant Taxonomists (since 1999) and Fellow, Indian Botanical Society (since 2015). Notably, in 2016, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in recognition of his exceptional service to the field.

David Mabberley served as the President of the Society for the History of Natural History between 1993 and 1996. He was awarded the SHNH Book Prize (John Thackray Medal) in 2018 for his second book on the natural history artist Ferdinand Bauer (1760–1826), Painting by numbers – the life and art of Ferdinand Bauer.

To botanists David Mabberley hardly needs an introduction. His The plant book, first published in 1987 – re-titled Mabberley’s plant-book. A portable dictionary of plants, their classification and uses and now in its fourth edition – has become an essential tome for anyone working in taxonomic botany. Historical data are included in the entries in the Plant-book, but these merely represent a tiny fraction of Mabberley’s accumulated knowledge.

He has produced over three hundred and fifty publications, ranging from plant ecology and systematics to the history of science and botanical illustration. His most recent books include Mabberley’s Plant-book: A Dictionary of Plants, their Classification and Uses (2017); Painting by Numbers: The life and art of Ferdinand Bauer (2017); Sir Joseph Banks’ Florilegium (2017): Botanical treasures from Cook’s First Voyage; Botanical Revelation: European encounters with Australian plants before Darwin (2019) and Citrus: A World History (2024).

Mabberley is has published widely on the history of science and of botanical art. He is pre-eminently the biographer of Robert Brown (1773–1858). His definitive biography, Jupiter Botanicus Robert Brown of the British Museum, published in 1985 (Review in Archives of Natural History 14: 89–94), was applauded by the Society’s then honorary editor, J. H. Price, who remarked cogently that ‘It is impossible for anyone familiar with the carrying out of this form of historical research not to stand in some awe of the sheer quantity of painstaking, often tedious, perusal of background data represented in the final form of work’. (Earlier, Mabberley had contributed an essay ‘Robert Brown of the British museum: some ramifications’ to the Society’s symposium, History in the service of systematics, 1981: pp 101–109). That applies with equal force to the recent The Robert Brown handbook. A guide to the life and work of Robert Brown (1773–1858) Scottish botanist (with David T. Moore) and published in 2022 (reviewed in Archives of Natural History 49: 431–432), a collaborative compendium of historical information. Painstaking research characterizes all Mabberley’s publications in the history of natural history. As noted, he has published numerous books, as sole author and as co-author, about (for example) the natural history artist Ferdinand Bauer, Joseph Banks’s Florilegium’, Arthur Harry Church, and Flora Graeca. With Annette Giesecke (University of Delaware), he was general editor of Bloomsbury’s A cultural history of plants’ (six volumes) published in 2022.

The SHNH recognises his outstanding contribution to the many fields that his interests encompass and his extraordinary research contributions to botany, horticulture and taxonomy and for his significant publication outputs, including natural history, history of science and botanical art in additional to his research interests.

The SHNH Founders’ Medal 2024

The Society is very pleased to announce that our prestigious Founders’ Medal will this year be awarded to Professor Kristin Johnson, Professor and Director of Science, Technology, Health and Society at the University of Puget Sound, Washington, USA.

Kristin Johnson has contributed enormously to the history of natural history and the naturalist tradition in North America, particularly by exploring the actual practice of naturalists in the field and museum. Her publications include the wonderful book Ordering Life: Karl Jordan and the Naturalist Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), which explores the life of the German entomologist Karl Jordan, who spent much of his life working at Walter Rothschild’s museum at Tring in the UK. She has also published widely on a range of natural history topics, including the role of type-specimens in nineteenth century taxonomy, the science and religion debates in America, the making of the journal, The Ibis, and a not-to-be missed article on why natural history was once derided as stamp collecting. Unusually, Kristin also engages with creative non-fiction. Her historical novel The Species Maker, is a fictional exploration of debates over evolution in the 1920s (University of Alabama Press, 2021).

Kristin took her PhD at Oregon State University in 2003. As a professor at the University of Puget Sound, Washington since 2006, she teaches the history of biology and associated subjects such as evolution and ethics. She was involved for many years in the annual meeting of historians of natural history at Friday Harbor in the San Juan Islands and will be remembered and admired by decades of attendees. The Founders’ Medal of the Society for the History of Natural History goes to a scholar with wide ranging historical knowledge who loves the field, and its participants, and delights in bringing the subject alive.

Kristin said: ‘Well this was quite a surprise! As someone who teaches at a teaching-intensive, small liberal arts college while trying to maintain a research program, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this honour.’

The SHNH Founders’ Medal 2023

The Society is very pleased to announce that our prestigious Founders’ Medal will this year be awarded to Professor Geoff Moore, Emeritus Professor of Marine Biology at the University of London.

Professor P. Geoffrey Moore (“Geoff”) Moore served as President of the Society for the History of Natural History from 2009 to 2012 during which period several initiatives were brought to fruition, especially the invitation to Sir David Attenborough OM, CH, CVO, CBE, FRS, FZS, Hon. FLS to become the Society’s Patron (Archives of Natural History 37 (2): 189–190) and, consequently, in 2011, the Patron’s Review whereby an outstanding younger scholar is invited to contribute a review essay to Archives of Natural History.

Geoff has been a prolific author of scholarly papers on the history and bibliography of natural history. His publications, spanning a period of fifty years, include over 260 refereed papers on diverse topics including ecology, taxonomy, pollution and conservation; many in collaboration with colleagues and research students. His principal professional research interests lie in fisheries and marine ecology, so he is very well-informed about the history of work on marine natural history in waters around Great Britain. He has been especially interested in those naturalists who have been notable for teaching and writing and the institutions to which they belonged, and by extension, in broadcasters and writers and illustrators of “popular” natural histories.

The diversity of Geoff’s historical research is clear from the papers and short notes accepted for Archives of Natural History, from

• Dr Baird and his feminine eponyms; biographical considerations and ostracod nomenclature (32 (1): 92–105) to
• The supply of marine biological specimens (principally animals) for teaching and research in Great Britain from the nineteenth century until today (39 (2): 281–301) and
• Popularizing marine natural history in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain (41 (1): 45–62), and
• Edward Emrys Watkin (1900–1978): marine zoologist and educator“ (49 (2): 364–371).

Geoff’s fascinating paper on  The background to the proposition that plankton be used as food in the United Kingdom during the Second World War (38 (2): 287–299) detailing information that had been marked as ‘secret’ and which Geoff uncovered an archive at the Scottish Association for Marine Science proved extremely popular in the UK press including in The Scotsman and The Daily Mail.

The SHNH Founders’ Medal 2021 – 2022

The SHNH Founders’ Medal 2022

SHNH is delighted to award the prestigious SHNH Founder’s Medal this year to Professor Theodore “Ted” W. Piestch. The Founders’ Medal is awarded to persons who have made a substantial contribution to the study of the history or bibliography of natural history through a sustained record of high-quality publications, and a sustained contribution to dissemination of the history of natural history through practice or curation.

Ted Pietsch is Professor Emeritus in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, and Curator Emeritus of Fishes at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, University of Washington. He is a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, the Linnean Society of London, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the University of Washington Teaching Academy, and an Honorary Member of the Ichthyological Society of Japan.

He is interested primarily in marine ichthyology, especially the biosystematics, zoogeography, reproductive biology, and behavior of deep-sea fishes. As former curator of the Fish Collection of the University of Washington Burke Museum of Natural History (UWFishCollection.org), he is also interested in natural history collections and collection building, and in biotic survey and inventory, the latter best exemplified by a decade-long series of expeditions to collect plants and animals on the islands of the Kuril Archipelago in the Russian Far East.

Ted also led a two-year floral and faunal survey of the Elwha River Valley on the Olympic Peninsula in Western Washington State. A book on the Fishes of the Salish Sea: Puget Sound and the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca will soon be published by the UW Press.

Ted has also published extensively on the history of science, especially the history of ichthyology. Among the latter are works on the French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) and his 22-volume Histoire naturelle des poissons (1828–1849); bookdealer, publisher, and secret agent Louis Renard (1678/79–1746) and his Fishes, Crayfishes, and Crabs; the unpublished manuscripts of the seventeenth-century explorer-naturalist Charles Plumier (1646–1704); and on the history of natural history collection-building. His current efforts are directed toward an annotated, illustrated, English translation of Cuvier’s five-volume Histoire des sciences naturelles, depuis leur origine jusqu’a nos jours (1841­–1845), the first three volumes of which have already been published. (Source: https://faculty.washington.edu/twp/)

Definitive works on early ichthyologists include on: Peter Artedi (1705–1735), David Starr Jordan (1851–1931), Charles Henry Gilbert (1859–1928), and Edwin Chapin Starks (1867–1932).

Ted is also a regular contributor to Archives of Natural History published by Edinburgh University Press (https://www.euppublishing.com/loi/anh) and his forthcoming article (ANH 49.1 2022 in press) is ‘Charles Plumier’s anatomical drawings and description of the American crocodile, Crocodylus acutus (1694–1697)”.

In speaking of the award, Ted Pietsch said: ‘I am thrilled beyond description!!  It’s such a great honour to be recognized in this way’.

The SHNH Founders’ Medals 2021

Founders’ Medals are awarded on the nomination of Council to persons eminent in the fields of the history and/or bibliography of natural history; the award recognises the following achievements:

• A sustained record of high-quality publications in the field of the history of natural history.
• A sustained contribution to dissemination of the history of natural history through practice or curation.

The Panel decided to award two medals, recognising that none were awarded last year, that the two outstanding candidates both more than fulfilled the required achievements and that awarding two medals coincided with the 85th anniversary of the SHNH.

E. Geoffrey (Geoff) Hancock has been described as an example of the ‘compleat naturalist’ with a career spanning more than 50 years. A generalist and a specialist with an outstanding knowledge of zoology, botany and geology, his publication list that runs into well over 220 papers, at least 48 of which directly concern the History of Natural History. His work in the history of entomology is nothing short of foundational and inspired many of the current practitioners in the field. He has that precious intangible ‘feel’ for collections, so important when dealing with historic specimens often with poor or confused histories. As a curator himself, he knows how important meticulous reconstructions of historic collection and care practices are not only for the history of natural history but also for contemporary curation of historic collections. As a hands-on curator, he has made an enormous contribution to the physical preservation, data integrity and accessibility of the Hunterian’s historic collections. His recent publication ‘William Hunters World – The Art and Science of Eighteenth Century Collecting‘ and its associate exhibition have helped to publicise the importance of William Hunter’s 18th C entomology collection.

Robert McCracken (Bob) Peck is an acclaimed writer, naturalist, and historian of science whose books show us the wonders of the natural world and of scientific discovery. He has participated in scientific expeditions to South America, Africa, and Asia, travelled extensively, and lectured and published widely on the history of science and the history of exploration. He is an outstanding example of how to communicate the wonders of the natural world, the stories behind the science of field work, and the remarkable histories of naturalists and early explorers, bringing them to wide audiences. His revised and updated publication on The Natural History of Edward Lear is due shortly [now published]. He has been widely recognised for his multiple achievements and scholarship. His body of work ideally fits the criteria for being awarded the SHNH Founders’ Medal: a sustained record of high-quality publications in the field of the history of natural history; and a sustained contribution to dissemination of the history of natural history through practice or curation.