While scanning early literature on the acknowledgement of the complexity of organising and studying healthcare in societies, I got a bit distracted into my favourite pre-occupation of understanding early doctors. While the natural-history work (especially in British India; see Shyamal’s essay on Edward Balfour for example) had been an early pre-occupation of the military surgeons, there is also the early essays on deforestation and its effects coming from European colonialist doctors and physicians (see Richard Grove’s work on origins of western environmentalism). Continue reading →