Although Barton was a naturalist by inclination, medicine was to be his livelihood. The many pupils he helped prepare for the expanding young nation sometimes attained greater recognition than he, yet he labored on, using his Philadelphia medial practice as the means by which he funded his own botanical studies. Barton was a teacher of 182 recorded medical pupils, and author of 194 published titles, one of which was the first textbook of botany in America, the several editions of his 'Elements'. Much of this work remained in manuscript form, due to an often frustrating lack of financial backing in a new nation recovering from war and far more interested in history and religion than in the sciences.