Maria Sibylla Merian
Maria Sibylla Merian (2 April 164713 January 1717) was a German-born naturalist and scientific illustrator, a descendant of the Frankfurt branch of the Swiss Merian family. Merian was one of the first naturalists to observe insects directly.
Londa Schiebinger
Schiebinger tells the remarkable story of Maria Sibylla Merian, one of the few European women to voyage for science in the eighteenth century. In a moving passage in her magnificent 1705 "Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium", the German-born naturalist Merian recorded how the Indian and African slave populations in Surinam, then a Dutch colony, used the seeds of a plant she identified as the flos pavonis, literally ‘peacock flower’, as an abortifacient to abort their children so they would not become slaves like themselves. This book reveals how gender relations in Europe and its West Indian colonies influenced what European bioprospectors collected—and failed to collect—as they entered the rich knowledge traditions of the Caribbean. As Schiebinger tells, abortifacients were a body of knowledge that did not circulate freely between the West Indies and Europe. Trade winds of prevailing opinion impeded shiploads of New World abortifacients and knowledge of their use from ever reaching Europe.