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WHITELAW AINSLIE, Materia Indica: Or, some account of those articles which are employed by The Hindoos, and other Eastern nations, in their Medicine, Arts, and Agriculture; comprised also Formulae, with practical observations, names of diseases in various eastern languages, and a copious list of Oriental Books immediately connected with general science, and c. and c., London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1826

(Set of 2 Volumes)
Volume I: xiv and 654 pages
Volume II: xxxix and 604 pages
Rebound in red buckram
23 x 15.5 x 4 cm (each)

Whitelaw Ainslie was a British surgeon who joined the East India Company as an assistant surgeon in 1788. He spent the next 27 years in India studying local medicinal practices and drugs, while rising to the position of a surgeon in 1794, and superintending surgeon of the Southern Division Madras in 1810. One of the first Europeans to study or understand Ayurveda, Ainslie was greatly impressed by the range and practical value of India's materia medica and by the skills of the physicians he encountered in Madras. (David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, p. 45) In 1813, he published his findings in Materia Medica of Hindoostan, and Artisan's and Agriculturist's Nomenclature, whose purpose was to make local remedies accessible to the British Army, and reduce the cost of imported drugs. At the same time, he also sought to bridge the gap between Western and Eastern medical cultures. In 1815, Ainslie retired from the Company and spent his remaining years in England writing about his findings. The present lot is Ainslie's second book cataloguing Indian drugs, originally published in 1826.