Introduction
Established in 1639, the English East India Company's settlement at Madras (also known as Madraspatam or Chinapatam, now Chennai) quickly become the focal point of the Company's operations on the Coromandel Coast. By 1695, Samuel Baron described it as 'the most considerable to the English nation of all their settlements in India whether...in reference to the trade to and from Europe, or the Commerce from one part of India to the other'.245 The early attempts to establish trades to China and Japan, to resettle in the Indonesian archipelago, and to gain a foothold in Bengal, were all directed from Fort St George. This was the town were Governor Elihu Yale made his fortune dealing diamonds, where the Venetian chancer Nicolò Manucci, physician to the Emperor Aurangzeb, spent his last days,246 and through which traders and adventurers passed, stopping to trade cloth, drugs, and stories. Here, I examine the botanical and medical networks that grew up around the town as described in the correspondence of two East India Company surgeons, Samuel Browne and Edward Bulkley, with the English apothecary and botantist James Petiver.
Recently, interest in the botanical, biological and environmental aspects of the 'scientific revolution' has supplanted an earlier emphasis on physics and mathematics. The idea of 'networks', fashionable in economic history, has been transplanted to the collectors, botanists, and doctors who amassed, drew, described, categorised, and circulated plant and animal specimens.247 The interaction between Indian and Portuguese medicinal systems has received attention, as has the creation of medical
245 BL MS Add 34123 – 'Copybook of Henry Vansittart, Governor of Bombay, 1756', fols. 40-42: 'Samuel Baron's account of the trade of India, written from Fort St George in 1695'.
246 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 'Further thoughts on an enigma: The tortuous life of Nicolò Manucci 1638-c.1720', The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 45, (2008): 35-76.
247 Spary, Utopia's garden; Raj, Relocating Modern Science.
discourses in colonial India.248 Arnold has called for historians to see European medical ventures overseas as ‘more than just a series of independent national narratives; to view them instead in a comparative, transnational perspective’ and to examine the continuity between Portuguese, Dutch and English physicians in the East Indies between 1500 and 1750.249 Nevertheless, Arnold has argued elsewhere that at least until the end of the seventeenth century, India was still ‘medical speaking, a largely unknown land to Europeans’.250
There is, perhaps, a conceptual difference here that Arnold does not spell out between the academic study of āyurveda, siddha, or yūnāni tibb251 and the assimilation of particular drugs, concepts, or methods of treatment from Indian medicinal systems into European medicine.252 During the seventeenth century and early eighteenth centuries, the English settlements followed their
Portuguese and Dutch counterparts in borrowing from the methods of treatment they observed at the courts of rulers – where they were frequently called on to perform medical services – and worked closely with local experts both in treating patients in the hospitals and army camps and in collecting plants and recording their local names and medicinal properties. Looking at early interactions between the English East India Company surgeons and their informants, including South Asian botanists and medical practitioners, the doctors at the courts of royals and noblemen, VOC surgeons and botanists like the compiler of the Hortus Malabaricus van Rheede and Paul Hermann,253 and
248 Guy Attewell, Drugs in dialogue: Arabic learning and the linking of Europe and Asia in the Colóquios (1563) of Garcia de Orta. Paper circulated for discussion at Anglo-Dutch-German workshop: ‘Travelling knowledge’, The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, June, 2007. Pearson, 'The Thin End of the Wedge';
Arnold, Colonising the Body; Harrison, Climates and Constitutions.
249 Arnold, Warm climates and western medicine, p. 11.
250 Arnold, Colonizing the Body, p. 11. Arnold and others have noted the brief descriptions of Indian medicine by John Marshall, who was the first to note the tridosa system, and John Fryer. See S. A. Khan, John Marshall in India:
notes and observations in Bengal, 1668-1672 (London: Oxford University Press, H. Milford, 1927), pp. 319-351.
251 As Pearson, 'The Thin End of the Wedge', p. 150 points out, yunani or unani is derived from the word 'Greek', referring to Greek influence on Muslim medicine. However, Hindu medicine was also an important influence on yunani as practised in early modern India. See Seema Alavi, Islam and healing: loss and recovery of an Indo-Muslim medical tradition, 1600-1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
252 This process of assimilation of medicines and techniques continued into the nineteenth century, as demonstrated by Benjamin Heyne, Tracts Historical and Statistical on India (London: Robert Baldwin, 1814).
253 Paul Hermann Paradisus Batavus (Leiden: 1689). Hermann spent several years in Ceylon. His collections, described in Carl von Linné, Flora Zeylonica (Amsterdam: J. Wetstenium, 1748), are preserved in the Natural History
Museum. A searchable database of the specimens is available at http://www.nhm.ac.uk/jdsml/research-curation/research/projects/hermann-herbarium/ (accessed 29 June 2010).
Jesuit priests like George Camelli, can help bridge the gap Arnold identifies between the early European encounters with South Asian medicine and later colonial medicine.
Grove has argued that the study of the networks through which botanical knowledge was distributed demonstrates the shared roots of India, Middle Eastern and European medicine and how European science was 'transformed by indigenous technical knowledge' in this period.254 While other authors have made important qualifications to Grove's argument,255 botanical texts composed in South Asia and printed in European languages can provide information about Asian medical practises and botany.256 Furthermore, examining the knowledge networks through which they were circulated can demonstrate the process through which the diffusion – and appropriation and reconfiguration – of biological knowledge took place. In our case, the collections made by Browne and Bulkley provide a window into the practise of medicine in seventeenth century Tamil Nadu. Meanwhile, looking at the networks they were embedded in, locally and internationally, shows how the knowledge was disseminated and decontextuarised. I will show how these the East India Company surgeons, in close cooperation with local experts, collected and labelled the items that eventually ended up among the wares of London apothecaries and in the Sloane herbarium: the collection that formed the basis of the Natural History Museum. Comparing the collections the surgeons sent, especially Browne's seven volumes, collected over a short period during 1696, with the Hortus Malabaricus reveals some interesting parallels and contrasts between the practise of siddha in early seventeenth century Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The specimens that reached England through the collections sent by Browne, Bulkley and others including Camelli and Cunningham, to James Petiver and his contemporaries were the same as those sold in apothecaries' shops along with instructions for their use ultimately derived from South Asian sources.257
254 Grove, Green Imperialism, p. 79. Harrison, Climates and Constitutions, esp p. 8-9, argues that any clear division between 'Eastern' and 'Western' medicine is illusory.
255 Attewell, 'Drugs in Dialogue' is critical of Grove's classification of Garcia d'Orta's work along with that of van Rheede as an 'indigenous' texts.
256 Manilal, Van Rheede’s Hortus Malabaricus.
257 Imports of non-European drugs into England soared during the seventeenth century: estimates have put the total at
The materials that I will present here are drawn to a large degree from the letters of East India Company surgeons to James Petiver preserved in the Sloane manuscripts in the British Library. It might therefore have seemed natural to have placed Petiver as the collector at the centre of the network. The choice of Madras rather than London as a node around which plants, medicines, and information circulated is in part an attempt to stress that the activities associated with the 'scientific revolution': the assiduous collection and detailed study of natural objects, the amassing of libraries of printed texts, manuscripts and of 'repositories' of curiosities and books of dried plants, exchange of information, and the formulation of theories about the natural world were not confined to European capitals but took place in colonial settlements and outposts.258 Raj has stressed that the collectors relied on by metropolitan scientists were not 'space probes', in other words they had their own priorities and agendas and should be regarded in the light of their immediate economic and social contexts.259 While the process by which instructions for collecting and observing were
composed and despatched by organisations like the Royal Society has attracted detailed attention in recent years,260 the social situations and knowledge networks of those who responded to these inquiries has received less attention. Although European patrons and correspondents were important to the surgeons, they were embedded in other networks and often dismiss Petiver's demands for more pressing business, whether attending royal patients, marketing drugs locally, tending the plants from China, Sri Lanka, and the Coast of Guinea that they planted in the Company's gardens, or fulfilling their duties in the service of the Mughal Empire. The collections they sent reflect these
70% by 1669, up from 14% in 1588 and 48% in 1621. T.J.S. Patterson, 'The relationship of Indian and European practitioners of medicine from the sixteenth century', in Studies on Indian Medical History ed. G. Jan Meulenbald and Domanik Wujastyk, Indian Medical Tradition, V, (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2001).Chakrabarti, 'Neither Meate nor Drinke but what the Doctor alloweth'.
258 Savithri Preetha Nair. 'Native collecting and natural knowledge (1798-1832): Raja Serfoji II of Tanjore as a “centre of calculation”', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, series 3, 3 (2005): 279-302.
259 Kapil Raj, 'Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants and Craftspeople: Making L'Empereur's Jardin in Early Modern South Asia', in Swan and Schiebinger, Colonial Botany.
260 John Gascoigne, 'The Royal Society, natural history and the peoples of the “New World(s)”, 1660–1800', British Journal for the History of Science, 42 (2009), 539-562; Carey, Asian Travel in the Renaissance; Harold J. Cook and David S. Lux, 'Closed Circles or Open Networks? Communicating at a Distance during the Scientific Revolution', History of Science, 36 (1998), 179-211. Thomas, 'A ‘Philosophical Storehouse’.
roles as well as their relationships with the collectors in London. Therefore, as well as examining their embeddness in the knowledge networks that transmitted information to and through Europe, I will look into some of these local spaces inhabited by the two surgeons to observe the processes by which they amassed the information they transmitted to Petiver.
The surgeons and their collections
Samuel Browne was appointed to the position of surgeon of Madras in 1688, after serving as a ship's surgeon.261 Petiver became acquainted with Browne through the clergyman and collector Richard Sambach in 1689, and the two corresponded until Browne's death in 1698.262 Among many other specimens, the collections Browne sent to England during this period included seven volumes of dried and labelled plants with their Tamil names in the original script and accounts of their medicinal virtues.263 These volumes are especially interesting because they can be matched with a series of articles published in Philosophical Transactions which contain comments from Petiver and cross-references to other contemporary works of botany, particularly the Hortus Malabaricus.264 Brown also sent many other individual specimens, most including accounts of their local names and uses. Edward Bulkley, previously surgeon of Pettipoli, joined Browne at Fort St George in 1692 and remained in the position until 1709 when he resigned and became 'land customer' and member of council and Justice of the Peace until his death in 1713.265 He corresponded with Petiver from at
261 D. G. Crawford, History of the Indian Medical Service, 1600-1913, 2 vols. (London: W. Thacker & Co., 1914), I, p.
91. Browne was previously the surgeon of a ship called the Dragon.
262 The first letter from Petiver to Brown is dated 61 March 1689, BL MS Sloane 3332, fols. 6-7. Petiver sends a book on English botany and requests a correspondence. Browne's burial on 22 December 1698 is recorded in the book of Marriages, Burials and Christenings kept in the museum at the Fort in Chennai.
263 The specimens are kept in the Sloane Herbarium in the Natural History Museum and described in J. E. Dandy, The Sloane Herbarium: An annotated list of the Horti Sicci composing it (London: British Museum, 1958). Manuscript notes in the front of the first Browne volume in the Sloane herbarium note that the seven books were borrowed by James Petiver and Hans Sloane during 1699 from the Royal Society's repository, to which they had been transferred after a request to the East India Company. A note by Fra[ncis] Hawskbee reads 'The 1 2 3 & 4 books are in the Society's house, the rest are missing.' Presumably the rest were returned to the repository at a later stage.
264 The seven articles are all published in Philosophical Transactions, 22 (1700/1), 579-594, 699-721, 843-858, 933-946, 1007-1022, and 23 (1702/3), 1055-1056, 1251-1265. Petiver refers to each of the specimens as 'SB' followed by the number of the specimens in the seven volumes of the Sloane Herbarium. I have adopted Petiver's system in the references below. As Dandy, p. 101 notes, an eighth book is also described in Philosophical Transactions, 23, 1450-1460, but this was sent after Browne's death and also contains specimens from Bulkley. For other volumes containing specimens collected by Brown Dandy, p. 102.
265 Crawford, History of the IMS, p. 245.
least 1699 until 1713 and sent several volumes of plant specimens as well as drawings of wildlife, especially birds.266
Many of the specimens sent by the surgeons now remain in the Sloane Herbarium. However, it is clear that the volume of plant material sent from Fort St George to England in this period was considerably larger. For example, Bulkley refers in one letter to having sent twenty volumes of specimens to Petiver.267 As noted in the introduction, both the Royal Society and the East India Company kept 'repositories' or museums of specimens sent from abroad, and objects were transferred between the two. Browne's volumes provide a good example of this process: he
dedicated the volumes to the East India Company but adds 'please if they be thought worthy of any notice to permitt Mr Petiver the Apothecary in Alderman street with whom I have corresponded about plants to have a sight thereof.' 268 The volumes were accordingly transferred to the Royal Society, from where they were borrowed and examined by James Petiver and Hans Sloane and then eventually integrated into the Sloane collection.269
Both surgeons also corresponded with several other botanists, gardeners, and doctors in England, including John Ray, Leonard Plucknet, Hans Sloane, the Duchess of Beaufort, and the Secretary of the East India Company, Charles du Bois. Bulkley refers to sending collections to several
apothecaries including his brother in law, who ran a shop in Bread Street, and Mr Porter, a druggist in Cornhill Street.270 The circle of botanists who received collections from the East Indies formed a close, though not always friendly,271 group in London who spanned the East India Company, the Royal Society, and the Society of Apothecaries and the surgeons often instructed their
266 Bulkley's letters to Petiver are mainly in BL Sloane MSS 3321 and 3322. Volumes in the Sloane herbarium (hereafter HS following Dandy) including his specimens are given by Dandy, p. 109.
267 MS Sloane 3321, fol. 133 – Bulkley to Petiver, 10 February 1703/4.
268 Sloane Herbarium, 'Plants Fort St George and India, 1697, I-III', FSG, 20 September 1697.
269 This was probably in 1781 with the rest of the collection (personal communication, Jenni Thomas).
270 MS Sloane 3321, fol. 18, Edward Bulkley to James Petiver, FSG 12 October 1699.
271 Petiver uses much of his commentary on Browne's collections to level criticism at his rival Leonard Plucknet.
correspondents to circulate or parcel out the specimens they sent between them. A good example of how collections were distributed is recorded in the minutes of the Royal Society. On 26 October 1698, the Vice-President John Hoskins told a meeting of the Royal Society that ‘some natural things were in the hands of the East India Company lately sent them from Fort St George’.272 A committee was deputed to go to the East India Company and request that these be submitted to the Society for their consideration. The Court of Directors agreed, giving over to the Society a barber’s shop full of seeds.273 These seeds were examined, catalogued,274 and the following spring, those seeds which were thought to be fit for sowing were distributed to Mr Wedale, Mr (Samuel) Doody (Curator of the Chelsea Physic Garden), The Bishop of London, the Duchess of Beaufort,275 Mr (Charles) Dubois,276 and Dr (Jacob) Bobart (of the Oxford Botanical Gardens), ‘to be by them raised, and an account of the success and specimens of such use sent to the Society’.277 The following winter, Hans Sloane showed the Society the fruits from some of the seeds they had sent to the Duchess of
Beaufort, noting that ‘there were some fruits such as were never seen in England as China oranges, Guava’s brought so ripe they had their flavour.'278 There was also cotton ripened which produced seed in that Garden. Apothecaries also participated in the testing of new drugs from abroad and with growing specimens, particularly in the Apothecaries' Garden in Chelsea.279 Many more plants,
272 Royal Society, Journal Book [hereafter JB], Vol. 10, meeting of 26 October 1698.
273 JB, Vol. 10. It seems that the initial request was triggered by Browne's volumes. Also several of these do contain small envelopes with seeds, the reference to the barber's ship implies that there were more seeds than those sent by Browne.
274 JB, Vol. 10, November 23 1698 ‘Mr Pepys, Mr Pettiver, Dr Havers & Dr Sloane were appointed a Committee to looke after putting in order the East India Collection now received from the E. India Company & the same persons were ordered to return the thanks of the Society [to the EIC]’.
275 Mary Somerset, the Duchess of Beaufort was an avid gardener, and assisted for a time by William Sherard, she amassed a collection of thousands of rare species from around the world at her estate in Badminton. P. E. Kell,
‘Somerset , Mary, duchess of Beaufort (bap. 1630, d. 1715)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.ulrls.lon.ac.uk:80/view/article/40544, accessed 26 November 2007].
276 Dubois was the treasurer of the East India Company and a sponsor of Petiver, Ray, and Catesby. His garden at Mitcham, Surrey was filled with exotic plants and his 13,000 specimens of dried plants in 74 volumes were given to the Oxford Botanical Garden. See B. D. Jackson, ‘Dubois, Charles (bap. 1658, d. 1740)’, rev. P. E. Kell, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2006
[http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.ulrls.lon.ac.uk:80/view/article/8113, accessed 14 Dec 2007].
277 JB, Vol 10. March 1 1698/9.
278 JB, Vol. 10, December 20 1699.
279 James Petiver, 'Some Farther Account of Divers Rare Plants, Lately Observed in Several Curious Gardens about London, and Particularly in the Company of Apothecaries Physick-Garden at Chelsey', Philosophical Transactions 27 (1710 - 1712), 416-426. For example, Petiver's comments on SB45 (Tamil: 'Moolepuncodee') notes that Plukenet has grown this in Chelsea.
medicines, and specimens sent from Asia were bought by into private collectors and for sale in apothecaries shops and other places of exchange in early modern London.
Although Bulkley and Browne passed on many of their collections to Petiver, du Bois, Pluckenet, and others, they were by no means simply acting as conduits of information to London. Contacts in Europe fulfilled a range of functions for the Company surgeons: a powerful member of the East India Company's board like Charles du Bois might be leaned on for patronage in return for indulging his interests in gardening: in one instance Bulkley sent du Bois five volumes of dried
Although Bulkley and Browne passed on many of their collections to Petiver, du Bois, Pluckenet, and others, they were by no means simply acting as conduits of information to London. Contacts in Europe fulfilled a range of functions for the Company surgeons: a powerful member of the East India Company's board like Charles du Bois might be leaned on for patronage in return for indulging his interests in gardening: in one instance Bulkley sent du Bois five volumes of dried