Gaius Plinius Secondus (Pliny the Elder)

The famous Roman naturalist, born in Como, Italy in 23 AD and who died during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. In his mighty work, the "Naturalis Historia", a kind of encyclopaedia of the natural sciences, he mentions that cotton was cultivated in Egypt.

Pietro Andrea Mattioli

Siena 1501 - Trento 1557 A graduate of the University of Padua, Pietro Andrea Mattioli studied surgery in Perugia and Rome. He then moved to Trento, where he was counsellor and personal physician to the Prince-Bishop Bernardo Clesio, at Buonconsiglio Castle.
Between 1541 and 1542, in Gorizia, he worked on a translation from Greek of De Materia Medica di Dioscorides. Mattioli did not just translate the work, but completed it with the results of a series of studies on plants that were still unknown at the time. His "Commentaries" became a fundamental work on medicinal plants - a true point of reference for scientists and doctors, and were translated into several languages for several centuries. The cotton plant is also mentioned in this work.

Prospero Alpini

(Marostica 1553 – Padova 1617) Prosper Alpinus graduated in medicine at the University of Padua in 1578. In 1580, the Venetian patrician Giorgio Emo, appointed consul in Cairo in Egypt by the Venetian Republic, wanted him as his personal physician. Thus, until 1584, he lived in Egypt where he devoted himself to the study of botany.
From the cultivation of date palms, Alpinus deduced the concept of sexual differences in plants, later adopted as the foundation for Linnaeus' scientific classification. In 1593 he obtained a professorship at the University of Padua and from 1603 he was appointed prefect of the botanical garden and as a professor he specialized in medicinal plants for therapy and research. His works and his activities, both botanical and medical, made him famous all over Europe, so much so that Albrecht von Haller called him "medicus et Botanicus celeberrimus." In botany, his most famous work was De Plantis Aegypti Liber, which was highly successful and widely disseminated with multiple editions and reprints. The cotton plant is described in this work.

Remberti Dodonaei

(Malines 1517 – Leida 1585) Rembert Dodoens was a Flemish botanist and physician.
After a professorship at the University of Leuven, in 1574 he was court physician to the Emperor Maximilian II in Vienna. His interest in botany was primarily medical in nature. In his famous Flemish herbarium, entitled Cruydt-Boek, 1554, the cotton plant is also described (pictured on the side). The work was translated into French in the Histoire des plantes by Charles de l'écluse.

Peter Forsskål

(Helsinki 1732 - 1763) Peter Forsskål was an explorer, orientalist, naturalist and an apostle of Carl Linnaeus. In 1760 he was appointed by King Frederick V of Denmark to take part in a scientific expedition to Egypt and Arabia, sponsored by the Danish government. Here, in addition to studying Arabic, Forsskål collected countless botanical and zoological samples, until 1763 when he died of malaria. His manuscripts were entrusted to Niebuhr, his companion, the only survivor of the expedition, which were published in 1775 with the title "Flora Aegyptiaco - Arabica sive Descriptiones Plantarum quas for Aegyptum Inferiorem et Arabiam Felicem detexit, illustravit Petrus Forskal, 1775". His herbarium was rebuilt about 150 years after his death by the botanist Carl Christensen. In the book, cotton is described among the many plants of Lower Egypt and Arabia.