Sessé y Lacasta, Martin de, 1751-1808

Born in Aragon, Spain, in 1751, Martin de Sessé y Lacasta studied medicine at the Hospital de Nuestra Sra. de Gracia at Zaragoza before taking an assignment in Mexico in 1780. Serving as a military physician in the capitol, he rapidly became an important member of the colonial learned elite, helping to inaugurate a course in botany at the Pontifical University and to found the Royal Botanical Garden in Mexico City in 1788.

In August 1788, Sessé approached the Viceroy, the Conde Revillagigedo, with an ambitious plan to conduct a natural historical survey of New Spain. Led by Sessé and the botanist Mariano Moçiño, the expedition included a number of prominent figures in Mexican science, including the anatomist and surgeon José Longinos Martínez, José Maldonado, and the artist Atanasio Echeverría. The Royal Botanical Expedition (also called the Sessé and Moçiño, Expedition) became one of the great scientific achievements of eighteenth century Mexico, covering the terrain from California almost to Costa Rica, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, and resulting in an herbarium of over 8,000 specimens along with over 500 birds and 300 fish, as well as 2,000 paintings by Echeverría. Less systematically, the Expedition recorded information about geography, geology, and ethnology, and collected rock and mineral specimens and other scientific curiosities.

After sixteen years of work, Sessé and Moçiño returned to Spain in 1803 by order of the King, taking the collections with them in order to prepare them for publication. However, Sessé's death in 1808 followed by political turmoil in Europe delayed plans for decades. The results of the expedition did not finally appear in print until 1887, when they were published in Mexico City as Plantae Novae Hispaniae and Flora Mexicana .

From the guide to the Catalogo de animales y plantas Mexicanas, 1794, (American Philosophical Society)