User:FaezRCh/sandbox

Context

In the first half of the 20th century, much of the world was under colonial rule, including the Dutch East Indies. New access to a wide array of previously unstudied plants allowed botanical research to flourish under colonial rule and became highly institutionalised. This was largely linked to the establishment of botanical gardens including greenhouses which allowed plants to be moved around globally. A high degree of attention was paid to indigenous uses of plants, and especially on their medical uses, known locally as jamu (also historically spelled djamoe), due to exposure to new diseases for which they knew no treatments. During the colonial period, Indonesian physicians had focused on Western medicine and were typically quite removed from the indigenous world, and therefore after Indonesian independence, works by Dutch authors, especially in the form of guides, became valuable resources in promoting further scientific research about jamu. However, colonial botanical research was also broadly directed towards plants that were economically significant, that could be processed to yield marketable products. Despite colonial interests, literature on this topic in the Dutch East Indies was lacking. The first series of books on the subject was The useful plants of the Dutch East Indies by Karel Heyne.

Kerel Heyne resided in Buitenzorg (now Bogor) from 1906 to 1927, where he worked primarily in categorising local Javanese plants at the Buitenzorg Botanical Garden. This followed M. Treub, who had been appointed director of the botanical gardens in 1880, successfully arguing for support for research regarding Indonesian flora of economic significance. It is in this context that Heyne began writing his book, which aimed to categorise and catalogue the plants of economic significance present in the botanical garden's reserves, both with their local and scientific names, thus addressing the lack of publications on the matter. Through his books, he wished to lay fundamental groundwork for future botanical and sociological research on Indonesian flora, as with the exception of a small number of guide books, most of the information about the native plants' uses was simply unavailable prior to this book's publication.

While writing his book, Heyne, who had no formal training in taxonomy, collaborated a lot with other researchers posted at the botanical gardens, namely T. Valeton, C. A. Backer, and C. R. W. K. van Alderwerelt van Rosenburgh, who aided him primarily in identifying specimens. Whilst the degree to which they collaborated varried, with van Rosenburgh looking mostly at ferns and Valeton mostly at "ginger allies", Backer, whose worked focused on Javanese trees, provided a large number of plant names. There are also records of two autochtones, Arsin (? - 1913) and Sapei (1870-1934), who were employed at the botanical gardens and who, despite having no formal botanical training, are said to have been particularly good at identifying plants, including of incomplete specimens. The book series Herbarium Amboinense (1741) by G. E. Rumphius, which catalogued the flora of Amboina, was a major source of information for the content of Heyne's book, and Rumphius is referenced freuently, both for botanical descriptions and some traditional uses. Furthermore, Heyne corresponded extensively with with Mrs. Jans Kloppenburg-Versteegh, a Dutch-Indonesian expert on Indonesian herbal medicine who had herself authored a similar but smaller guide in 1907 focusing on medicinal plants, and she was deemed by Heyne to be one of the most reliable sources on this matter.