Christine ’s Reviews > The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe > Status Update

An herb woman: one schooled in the largely oral tradition of the curative properties of plants. Herb women were for centuries the source of all raw materials to be prepared, mixed and sold by male medical practitioners, and as botany crystallized as a science in the 18th century, handful of male botanists did not think it beneath them to learn from these specialists.

Baret was not Commerson’s pupil, but his teacher.