Rai Bahadur Kanny Lall Dey,

Until the advent of synthetic chemistry in the 19th century, regional medicinal plant knowledge continued to be documented and made available specifically for the benefit of British physicians newly arriving in India, "for the gentlemen of the medical profession on their first arrival in India, to whom it must be desirable to know what articles of the Materia Medica of this country affords, and by what names they may find them." (Fleming, John, A Catalogue of Indian Medical Plants and Drugs, With Their Names in the Hindustani and Sanskrit Languages, Asiatick Researches, XI, 153, 1810). In addition, the Government of British India appointed an Indigenous Drug Committee, including Indian Physician Rai Bahadur Kanny Lall Dey and British physicians and naturalists. A publication resulting from one such collaboration "The indigenous drugs of India: short descriptive notices of the principal medicinal products met with in British India" (Kanny Lall Dey, William Mair, Calcutta, Thacker, Spink and Co.,1896) recommended inclusion of indigenous drugs for distribution to various hospitals for trial and report. Today these documents remain invaluable resources of early attempts of integration and traditional Indian medicine with European therapies of the 19th century. And they are resources of the many vanished regional medicines and therapies not found in Indian classical medical texts. They may be more accessible to current research scholars than Indian classical medical texts, since these European documents describe medicinal properties of individual plants and describe disease symptoms in terms more related to biomedicine.