The Legacy of a 'Celestial' Mind

290th anniversary of the birth of the greatest scientist in the history of Spain (1832-2022)

The ocean sea surrounds everything. Leaning on the edge of La Castilla, ship of the Spanish navy. The young scientist suffers from a kind of hallucinogenic vision in the middle of that deep blue, without an inch of solid ground for thousands of miles around. The immensity of the Atlantic captivates him and at the same time shakes him. He has been nauseous for days and knows that the trip will take another two weeks. Despite his youth, he is already one of the cleverest minds of the Spanish Enlightenment and, as a great challenge in his life, he has agreed to become the personal physician of Pedro Messía de la Cerda, viceroy of New Granada, a vast territory that would correspond to present-day Colombia and Venezuela. It's the end of the summer of 1760.

Many years before that day, in the early morning of April 6, 1732, on the top floor of the small bookstore that his father ran in Cádiz, his mother, Gregoria Bosio, squeezed the sheets on the bed with her hands trying to open the door to the world for her first son.

“You will bear the name of all your grandparents,” said his father, Julián Mutis, as he held him in his arms for the first time.

—You will be called José Celestino Bruno Mutis Bosio, and you will be—he went without telling him—the greatest scientist in the kingdom of Spain. His father, obviously, was unable to imagine it then.

The day José Celestino Mutis arrived in Santafe de Bogotá, at only 28 years old, he already had a prestigious reputation as a doctor, theologian, naturalist and botanist. His contact with the lands of the New World fascinated him for life. He suffered from mosquitoes, the scorching heat of the Ecuadorian climate and diarrhea, but was enchanted by the lush flora of the rainforests. His direct doctor-patient relationship with the viceroy allowed him to have a large amount of funding from Carlos III to finance the largest botanical expedition of the 18th century.

He dedicated 33 years of his life to traveling rivers and river valleys, mountains and wetlands, jungles, Andean highlands and the Pacific coast, preparing the largest scientific compilation of his time, especially botany, without forgetting zoology, entomology, mineralogy or astronomical descriptions of the Ecuadorian night sky. He met in person with van Humboldt, who became pregnant with his ingenuity, and maintained a fruitful epistolary relationship with another genius of his time, Carl von Linneo, the Swedish genius who would say of Mutis: “we are facing the greatest scientific prodigy of our time”.

Mutis was also an impressive promoter of modern scientific culture in the midst of the Enlightenment, creating an encyclopedia of the plant kingdom illustrated with plates of his own hand that today are among the most beautiful in the world. He developed medical maps and manuals, plant-based pharmacological guidelines to combat diseases, anticipated the smallpox vaccine and identified and characterized the quinine tree and its febrifugal properties, an essential step for subsequent treatment against malaria. In physical matters, he disseminated with joy the ideas of Newton and Galileo, a circumstance that brought him to a bench in front of the court of the Holy Inquisition:

—Know your honourable Members—the man from Cádiz would defend himself before the Holy Office—, That men of science do nothing but study the divine work with wonder and humility, to bring their knowledge and greatness closer to those who look with the eyes of faith and wonder—, a bold argument that allowed him to avoid the bonfire, even if to do so he had to recover his clerical votes.

It is customary in our country to forget with worrying speed about historical figures who contributed to scientific knowledge, something unthinkable in other nations in our environment. The predilection with which France cultivates the legacies of Lamarck or Cuvier, the Anglo-Saxon devotion to Newton and Darwin or the permanent tribute that Germany pays to geniuses like Humboldt or Einstein, does not match the prestige that Spain should promote over our women and men in science. Mutis is a blatant case of this oblivion, perhaps influenced by his sympathies with the Colombian independence movement, which undoubtedly alienated him ideologically from the Bourbon crown at the beginning of the 19th century.

In an attempt to rescue his figure and legacy, and trying to make him popular in Spanish society, the National Coin and Stamp Factory would dedicate to him in April 1992, on the occasion of the Universal Exhibition in Seville, a banknote of the old two thousand pesetas in which the genius from Cádiz appears observing with his magnifying glass a small orchid, the Mutisia, thus catalogued by Linnaeus in honor of his marvelous colleague.

José Celestino Bruno Mutis y Bosio, the greatest Spanish natural scientist in our history, died the evening of September 11, 1808. The man who dedicated more than 30 years of his life to measuring, scrutinizing and describing the imposing tropical nature rests, with state honors, in the Colombian city of Rosario, a country that was able to pay him the tribute that Spain denied him and that now, for several decades, the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid has been trying to restore and remedy a responsible action that respects his memory, his scientific height and the prestige that the man who amazed Humboltd deserves, fell in love with Linnaeus and offered the world a description of nature At the height of works by Wallace or Darwin.

In 2022, the year in which the 290th anniversary of his birth is celebrated, from the blog of Ideas MedioAmbiental we join this tribute to highlight the figure and the heavenly legacy of the greatest scientist who illuminated our country.

To learn more:

• Trip to Santa Fe. Jose Celestino Mutis (1760)
• Mutis. Botanical Expedition. José Celestino Mutis and Esteban Manrique (1783)
• José Celestino Mutis Botanical Expedition to the New World. Francisco Jose de Caldas (2018)
• The life and work of José Celestino Mutis. Documentary: