Edward Morell Holmes

Holmes was educated at the Grammar School in Boston, Lincolnshire and the Grammar School in Wimborne Minster.[1] At age 14 he was apprenticed to a pharmacist in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London.[2] From 1873 to 1876 he was a lecturer on botany at Westminster Hospital Medical School. From 1887 to 1890 he was a lecturer on materia medica at the Pharmaceutical Society. At the Pharmaceutical Society's Materia Medica Museum, 17 Bloomsbury Square,[1] he was the curator from 1872 to 1922 and the emeritus curator from 1922 until his death in 1930.[4] (In 1921 an automobile hit him, necessitating the amputation of part of one leg.[5]) He published over 300 articles on drugs and medicinal plants.[1]

Though Holmes collected British and Irish plants, his papers also deal with taxa from Africa, Asia and the Americas and some with British insects.[3]

His mosses are at Cambridge, and his liverworts are at the National Museum and Gallery of Wales in Cardiff. His lichens are in individual glass-topped boxes at Nottingham (with other material that he collected dispersed in many other herbaria dispersed elsewhere in Britain), and his algae are at Birmingham. His letters are at Kew and the Linnean Society, and the Welcome Institute of the History of Medicine Library in London also has letters and manuscripts.[5]

In 1882 he married Catherine "Kate" Appleford (b. 1842), who also collected British plants. In 1935 she donated his papers to the Wellcome Library.[3] There were no children from the marriage.[1]

• Works written by or about Edward Morell Holmes at Wikisource