Two pioneers of tropical medicine: Garcia d'Orta and Nicolás Monardes / by C.R. Boxer.

  • Charles Ralph Boxer
Date:
[1963]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: Two pioneers of tropical medicine: Garcia d'Orta and Nicolás Monardes / by C.R. Boxer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    GARCIA D'ORTA AND NICOLAS MONARDES THIRTY-ONE years ago, Lt.-Cdr. Louis Roddis, a medical officer of the United States Navy, published a short article in the Annals of Medical History entitled Garcia da Orta. The first European writer on tropical medicine and a pioneer in pharmacognosy. After sketch- ing the achievements of d'Orta in these two fields, Roddis concluded his article with the following appeal: March 10, 1934, will be just four hundred years from the day on which da Orta set sail for India. It would be well if this date could be commemorated in some suitable manner by societies throughout the world concerned with the study and advancement of tropical medicine, pharmacy and botany. The issue of special editions of their official publications, or of articles and editorials on da Orta, his time and his work, would well fit the occasion and bring to members of the professions of medicine and pharmacy the memory of a pioneer in both fields.1 So far as I am aware, this appeal met with no major response, save for one important exception. It avowedly stimulated the distinguished Portuguese physician and medical historian, Dr. Augusto da Silva Carvalho, who was already investigating the life of Garcia d'Orta, to publish the result of his researches in a well-documented work printed at Coimbra three years later.2 This book, which has completely revolutionized our knowledge of Garcia d'Orta and exposed the fallacies unwittingly perpetrated by his previous biographers, is still little known in Portugal and even less outside that country, having escaped the knowledge of such a lynx-eyed researcher as Dr. Francisco Guerra. It is my chief object this evening to make a
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