John Hope

John Hope was a Scottish botanist and surgeon. He is known as an early supporter of Carl Linnaeus's system of species classification, mainly because he published little of the research that may have made him a name in plant physiology. His main group of plants to study were the seed plants.

Biography
Hope was born in Edinburgh on May 10, 1725, and was the son of surgeon Robert Hope, and grandson of Archibald Hope, Lord Rankeillour, a Senator of the College of Justice. He was taught at Dalkeith, and then began to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He left the study of medicine to study botany under Bernard de Jussieu in France, but returned to studying medicine and botany in Scotland, and in 1750, Hope graduated from the University of Glasgow.

For the next decade, Hope practiced medicine, and also included botany during his spare time. With the death of Charles Alston in 1760, Hope succeeded him as King's Botanist and as Professor of Botany and Materia Medica at the University of Edinburgh. However, he saw his responsibility for materia medica as a threat to his botanical works and decided to split the chair. Hope became the Professor of Medicine and Botany, and a separate chair for Materia Medica was created.

In 1763, Hope succeeded in combining the gardens and collections at Trinity Hospital and Holyrood to a new, combined site on the road leading to Leith. He also succeeded in obtaining a permanent investment for the garden, thus establishing arguably the first ever "Royal Botanical Garden". Though Hope only published a very small amount of papers, and is therefore barely remembered as a botanist, he undertook several early physiological experiments. These were instructed in his teaching, but were not published, and were discovered only within his unpublished manuscripts many years after he died in 1786. In February 1767, Hope was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

When citing a botanical name, John Hope is abbreviated as Hope.