Portuguese and Dutch Records of Indian Medicine

For the next 250 years physicians and scholars in the employ of the Portuguese, Dutch and later the British documented medicinal, agricultural and horticultural knowledge systems of India for therapeutic and economic benefit. This was the most important and lasting legacy from India to Europe.

The first of these texts was published in Goa (1568), in Portuguese, by the physician Garcia da Orta. Early in Orta’s tenure in India, he acknowledged "that there were certain medicines the Greeks did not know." (English translations, Clement Markham, 1913). As the first textbook on tropical medicine and materia medica by a European, the volume was translated into all major European languages and became an essential tool for Europeans in tropical colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries.

This image of the common Indian folk medicine/spice Carcapuli is from a book by the Portuguese physician Christoval Acosta (Spain, 1578). Acosta came to India to meet "learned and curious men from whom I could daily learn something new; and to see the diversity of plants God has created for human health in Oriental India." The book, intended as a guide for physicians in Europe using Indian medicines, included forty-seven illustrations of Indian medicines available in Europe at the end of the 16th century.

While in the employ of the Portuguese archbishop in Goa, the Dutchman Linschoten collected vital information on Portuguese life in Goa, including on Indian medicines and botany, for the fledgling Dutch East India Company. When he returned to Holland, Linschoten published his compilation of information with the help of the Dutch scholar physician Palladinus, in “On Spices, drugges, plants and stuffes for Physitions and Apothecaries, that is the common sort and such as are ordinarily used in India, and of their growing in what manner and place they grow.” The information was invaluable for the Dutch East India Company, and later also for the by British East India Company.

The most extensive pre-Linnean European compilation on Indian botany is the 12 volume Hortus Indicus Malabaricus, assembled by the Dutch Governor of Malabar Henrick Adrian van Rheede, and published in Amsterdam between 1678-1693. The volumes record 742 plants from regional medical traditions of Malabar with 792 copperplate engravings. This monumental project was driven by the need for new medicines by the Dutch colonists in Malabar and in other tropical colonies, thriving healing traditions of Malabar and the remarkable health of the people of Malabar.

Contributions of three Indian classical Ayurvedic medical physicians are also acknowledged in volume 1. Their combined testament in Konkani language, identifies them also as important contributors to the 12 Volumes.

This double folio copperplate engraving is an example of the exquisite illustrations in the Hortus Malabaricus. Each illustration includes roots, flowers, fruits and seed and some part of the plant drawn to size or juxtaposed with other images to provide sense of scale. Names of the plants are written in Malayalam (language of Malabar), Sanskrit, Latin and Arabic scripts. Unidentified Indian artists and two Dutch artists made the original drawings, later turned into copperplate engravings in the Netherlands.

The human figure, with the Cardamom plant added to indicate the size of the plant, could be a physician, a collector who procured the medicinal plants, or one of the Indian artists. In volume 3 van Rheede pays tribute to the Indian collaborators as "experts in plants to whose care it was entrusted to collect for us finally from everywhere the plants with the leaves, flowers and fruits for which they even climbed the highest tops of trees."

In addition to botanical medical knowledge collected by Europeans in India, physicians and scholars in Europe also compiled information about Indian Medical plants from travelers and traders. This woodcut of the Arched Indian Fig Tree is one of 280 images of Indian medicinal plants in ‘Generall Historie of Plantes’ published in England in 1597 by apothecary John Gerard. While Gerard had never been in India, he left fascination glimpses of the circuitous routes, knowledge and materials traveled from India to England in the 16th century. For Nasturtium indicum, he reports “the seed of this rare and faire plant came first from the Indies to Spaine and those hard regions, and from there to France and Flanders, from their I received seede… from Iohn Robbins of Paris.”

The remarkable knowledge of medicinal properties of regional plants Portuguese and Dutch collected in India was conveyed to botanical gardens in Europe associated with schools of medicine. In a communication in 1691 van Rheede states that plant collections he sent to Holland were “not only to satisfy the curiosity of many wise men and amateurs, but also in order that the world might enjoy and be served by the medicinal virtues.” Botanical gardens across Europe, in Leiden, Amsterdam, the Jardin du Roi in Paris, and later the Kew Royal Botanical Garden, cultivated exotic tropical plants for medicinal and horticultural purposes. These tropical plant collections had lasting influences on the study of botany as an independent discipline away from medicine. In his seminal work on plant taxonomy, Species Plantarum, Carl Linnaeus includes 320 Indian plants reported in Hortus Malabaricus.

This exhibition is part of a series on the India Spice Trade. Do explore the other sections here:

1. India: The Nexus of International Trade in the First Millennium

2. In Search of Knowledge and Riches: Communities in Indian Spice Trade

3. Europeans Enter Indian Spice Trade

5. British and the Botanical Wealth of India