Daniel Hanbury

Daniel Hanbury FRS (11 September 1825 – 24 March 1875) was a British botanist and pharmacologist. He was an early student of pharmacognosy, the study of the medicinal applications of nature, principally of plants. Life Hanbury was born on 11 September 1825 in Clapham, at that time in Surrey, the eldest son of Daniel Bell Hanbury, a Quaker pharmacist, and his wife Rachel, née Christy. He went to Clapham Grammar School in 1833, and in 1841 started work at his father's firm, Allen & Hanbury's in the City of London. In 1857 he completed his training in pharmaceutical chemistry at the Pharmaceutical Society. While there he had come into contact with pharmacist-botanists including Jacob Bell, Jonathan Pereira and Theophilus Redwood, and had become interested both in botany and in pharmacognosy, the knowledge of medicines, and particularly of their geographical and botanical origins. Hanbury never married, was a vegetarian, and – like many of his Victorian contemporaries – opposed the use of alcohol and tobacco.