Garcia de Orta

Garcia de Orta, also written Garcia d'Orta, was a Portuguese physician, herbalist and naturalist who worked mainly in Goa and Bombay in Portuguese India. He is regarded as a pioneer of tropical medicine, pharmacognosy and ethnobotany because he tested the identity and use of herbal medicines by experiment instead of relying wholly on received authority. His best known work, the Colóquios dos simples e drogas da India, published in 1563, is the earliest treatise on the medicinal and economic plants of India, and Carolus Clusius translated it into Latin. Of Jewish ancestry, he died before the Goa Inquisition, which later exhumed and burned his remains.