In his Letters on the Elements of Botany Addressed to a Lady (1771–3), Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed:

Rousseau's diagnosis was right; botany may have been a loosely defined subject in the late eighteenth century but, whatever it was, it was moribund, enslaved by medicine. New knowledge was rarely sought or found. In universities across Europe, botany was taught only to inform prospective doctors how to recognize materia medica, plants such as feverfew, foxglove and poppy, of interest for their medicinal properties. It would be another hundred years before botany emerged as a vital, independent science, free from medicine and founded on measurement and experiment.

Similarly, it would not be until the late nineteenth century – when women began to take their place at the laboratory bench – that botany would escape another misfortune; one placed upon its shoulders by male writers, including Rousseau, who, while undoubtedly popularizing the subject, characterized it as an amusing diversion or hobby for gentlewomen. Whereas the poorest of women had traditionally collected from the fields and hedgerows plants for the herbalists, these writers recommended that collecting and drying, naming and drawing plants, were now proper and praiseworthy pursuits for ladies. The problem was not the feminization of botany per se but rather its amateurization, and the sorts of botanical pursuits that were being promoted. What hope was there for the subject when the founder and President of the Linnean Society, James Edward Smith, wrote in the Preface to his Introduction to Physiological and Systematical Botany(1807):

Botany's development into an independent, experimental science was slow. As late as 1857, the respected literary review, the Athenaeum, was still able to complain: