Sort:  

'Good God. When I consider the melancholy fate of so many of botany's votaries, I am tempted to ask whether men are in their right mind who so desperately risk life and everything else through the love of collecting' plants.'

Carl Linnaeus, Glory of the Scientist (1737)

https://www.plantexplorers.com/explorers/index.html

That sums it up. Although life was also generally much more nasty, brutal and short for everyone