What features of medicinal plants produce ideas of nationhood? How can medical botany writing advance the symbolic and commercial promise of a postcolonial nation? In this talk, join Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez as she examines a seminal work in the history of medical botany in the Philippines, Eduardo Quisumbing’s Medicinal Plants of the Philippines (1951). Published from the rubble of Manila after the brutality of the Pacific War, Medicinal Plants of the Philippines relies on a particular brand of “encyclopedism” to recuperate the capital, its scientific institutions, and the nation more broadly following World War II. Gutierrez suggests that medicinal plants help to anchor—through reiterative and repetitive discourse—a particular vision of the nation, no matter the political persuasion.

Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with Ph.D. in Southeast Asian Studies and a Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies. A specialist of the plant sciences and Southeast Asia, Gutierrez will release her first book, Sovereign Vernaculars: [Un]making Botany in the Colonial Philippines, with Duke University Press in early 2025. At U.C. Santa Cruz, Gutierrez also serves as co-Principal Investigator for a community-engaged public history project on Filipino farm workers in California’s Pajaro Valley called Watsonville is in the Heart. For her efforts, she was presented the Richard E. Cone Award for Emerging Leaders in Community Engagement by LEAD California in 2024.

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