American Root Drugs: Restored Classics to Go Edition

Alice Henkel (1869–1916) was an American botanist who spent her career with the U.S. Department of Agriculture studying and promoting the cultivation of medicinal plants. Born into a family with a background in medicine and pharmacy, she came to Washington, D.C. after her father, an Ohio pharmacist, moved the family there for government work. She began at the USDA as a stenographer, and her aptitude for pharmacy and scientific transcription eventually drew the attention of department officials, opening a path into botanical work. She went on to study medical botany at the National College of Pharmacy, later absorbed into George Washington University. In 1898 Henkel joined the USDA's Division of Botany under chief botanist Frederick Vernon Coville, and by 1901 she was placed in charge of medicinal plants grown in the department's test gardens within the newly formed Bureau of Plant Industry. Over the following years she authored a series of widely read USDA bulletins on medicinal and drug-yielding plants, aimed at helping farmers identify, harvest, and market crude drugs from species often dismissed as weeds. Her work continued through the USDA's Office of Economic and Systematic Botany until her death in 1916, and her pamphlets were later consolidated into a posthumous USDA compilation that extended the reach of her research for decades afterward.