The British Indian Government has established medical colleges at Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, and Lahore, and at Bareilly is a medical school for native girls.
The nawab of Hyderabad in 1846 permitted Dr. Maclean, the Residency surgeon of Hyderabad, to open a medical school near the Residency. In 1876, the Madras Government, on the suggestion of Surgeon-General Balfour ; arranged for the medical instruction of women, and the Govern ments of Bombay, Bengal, and the Panjab have since followed in this, and in the N.W. Provinces, Travancore, and the Panjab other schools have been formed. The Bengal Government and the Travancore Government have founded scholar ships for them. The English E. I. Company from their first arrival in the country brought to it commissioned medical officers from Britain for their military and civil services ; and since the middle of the 19th century medical colleges have been established in connection with theUniversities of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. At these Indian colleges the majority of the students had been educated for the public service in its military and civil branches, but there have been many private students who have graduated in medicine and surgery.
In the 1st century of the Christian era, Dios corides made inquiry into the medicinal virtues of many Indian plants which were then brought to the markets of Europe. In the 2d-century, the great Cornelius Galen published his famous work, the leading opinions in which, as to hot and cold medicines, were borrowed film India, where they still prevail. In, the 7th and 8th centuries, natives of India practised as physicians in the Arabian hospitals of Baghdad, employing many valuable Indian drugs in their practice. TJnder Mamun, the Arabian" professors of that school obtained, and taught from translations of, the Sanskrit medical ahastras of Charaka and Susruta. Thus, in teaching medicine to the Hindus and Muhammadans, Europeans are literally merely repaying what, for at least seventeen centuries, they owed to India. The first establishment which British enterprise obtained in India, was won by the science and the noble disinterested patriot ism of two British surgeons,—Gabriel Broughton, who cured Shah Jahan's daughter of a frightful burn, and William Hamilton, who cured an ailment of Feroz Shah. Several of the medical officers of
the E. I. Company's Service have been dis tinguished as authors, as botanists, as zoologists, as philologists, as statisticians, as historians, and as physicians. Amongst them may be named Sir Whitelaw Ainslie, James Anderson, Sir James Annesiey, Sir George Birdwood, Buchanan Hamilton, Cantor, Crawfurd, Francis Day, Sir Joseph Fayrer, John Borthwiek Gilchrist, William Griffiths, William Hamilton, Jerdon, Sir William Marsden, M'Clelland, Sir William O'Shaughnessy, Richardson, Roxburgh, John Forbes Royle, Thomson, Nathanael Wallich, Edward Waring, Robert Wight, Horace Hayman Wilson. On the 10th January 1836, pandit Mudusudun Gupta, a medical teacher of the Baid or physician caste, began to teach the Hindus the study of practical anatomy by dissecting a human body with his own hand. And by 1872, about 1200 native students in the medical colleges of India were following his example. Also Hindu gentle men, who, having passed through a course of study as complete as any school in Europe can afford, have lately received in the Calcutta University that high degree of doctor, which in Salamanca of old gave the humblest scholar right of place among the superb Hidalgos of Spain, which in England ranks the physician and his brother doctor graduates only a few degrees below nobility. Doctor Chuckerbutty, a native of Bengal, and the first of his nation who achieved the honour of becoming a medical officer in Her Majesty's Indian army, first projected the Bengal Medical Association. About the year 1840, the plan of a Medical Mission was first recommended for Chins,—that is, of a Christian mission,—one main object of which was the conversion of the natives, the missionaries being medical men, securing an introduction through the practice of their profession. The arrangement seemed to be, for China, one of the best that could be conceived. And a similar plan has been adopted in India, in which Christian missionaries practise medicine, whilst instructing in their own doctrines. The Rev. Drs. Scudder, Strachan, Carslaw, Elder, Elmslie, Valentine, Parker, Green, Williams, Chester, Palmer, and Paterson have taught a pure faith to, and cured the bodily ailments of, the people, and their names will long be remem bered.