The Records (Timeline)

Some of the 16-17 Century books documenting medical, agricultural and horticultural knowledge systems of India, by Portuguese and Dutch colonists.

This timeline shows a selection of books assembled by Europeans during the 16-17th centuries on Indian botany and medicine along with major events in world history to place these collections in historical context. Encounter with unfamiliar regional tropical diseases was of great concern to Europeans on their arrival in India and other tropical regions of the world. Most of the earliest European books on non-European medicines were assembled from the long-standing medical knowledge traditions of India by European physicians and naturalists in the employ of their governments. At the end of the 17th century, the Dutch governor of Kochi, Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede, documented the rational for these efforts thus: "Indeed it would be possible to make use, with less expense and with greater profit, of Indian medicaments, either the same or at any rate with the same, with superior curative virtues, for the above mentioned reasons.” The exposure to an alternative and powerful botanical-medical knowledge system in India had lasting influences on European medicine and plant science in the pre-modern era. In addition, the botanical medical knowledge collected from traditional healers in India was also critically important for the European colonial enterprise in tropical colonies across the globe.