Frontispiece, Aromaticum et Simplium Aliquot, Medicamentorium Apud Indos Nascentium Hisoria

The first of these volumes was published in 1568 by Garcia da Orta, a Spanish naturalist-physician in the service of the Portuguese viceroy of Goa. Early in his tenure in India, as physician to the Portuguese viceroy, Orta acknowledged the inadequacy of European medicines in India, "that there were certain medicines the Greeks did not know," and "had I not been away in India I would not have been able to admit as much." (English translations, Clement Markham, 1913.). Orta interacted with Hindu and Muslim medical practitioners in and around Goa to learn traditional healing methods, and cultivated a traditional medicinal garden in his compound with the help of his housemaid, who was knowledgeable in the uses of Indian folk medicinal plant therapies

Detailed information about indigenous healing practices and the application of local medicinal plants compiled by Orta was published in Portuguese, for the benefit of his countrymen living in Goa. The original text, printed at the Rachol Seminary in Goa, India, was the second European book published in Asia. In his work Orta acknowledged that an important system of botanical medical knowledge unknown to Galen and the Greeks was available in India. Soon after Orta's book was published in India, it was taken to Europe where it stimulated intense interest of medics and scholars there, including Carolus Clusius who was then director of the Leiden Botanical Garden. Clusius incorporated Orta's work with that of Christoval Acosta, another physician in the employ of the Portuguese Viceroy in India, into a Latin Language publication illustrated here.

As the first textbook on tropical medicine and Indian materia medica written by a European, the work would transform the Western understanding of and appreciation for Asian medicine. Orta's text was translated into major European languages, soon after it was introduced to Europe (Latin Translation in 1567, with further editions in 1574, 1579, 1593, 1601, 1605 and 1611, Italian translations in 1579, 1593, 1601, 1605 and 1611, and a French translation in 1602). The book became an essential text for European physicians using regional medicinal plants in other tropical colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries.