Isaac Bayley Balfour, Sphagnum moss, and the Great War (1914–1918)

Abstract

Isaac Bayley Balfour was a systematist specializing in Sino-Himalayan plants. He enjoyed a long and exceptionally distinguished academic career yet he was knighted, in 1920, “for services in connection with the war”. Together with an Edinburgh surgeon, Charles Cathcart, he had discovered in 1914 something well known to German doctors; dried Sphagnum (bog moss) makes highly absorptive, antiseptic wound dressings. Balfour directed the expertise and resources of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (of which he was Keeper), towards the identification of the most useful Sphagnum species in Britain and the production of leaflets telling collectors where to find the moss in Scotland. By 1918 over one million such dressings were used by British hospitals each month. Cathcart's Edinburgh organisation, which received moss before making it into dressings, proved a working model soon adopted in Ireland, and later in both Canada and the United States.