Edward Balfour

Edward Green Balfour (1813 to 1889) was a Scottish surgeon, orientalist and early environmental thinker who spent most of his working life in India. Born in Montrose in Angus and trained in surgery at Edinburgh, where he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1833, he sailed in 1834 as an assistant surgeon in the Madras medical service and rose to head the Madras Medical Department as Surgeon-General from 1871 to 1876. His medical writing used statistics to study the health of troops in different climates and the choice of healthy sites for cantonments, and he wrote on cholera. He also translated a midwifery textbook into Urdu and arranged further translations so that practitioners in India could read it. Beyond medicine he founded the Government Central Museum at Madras and a zoological garden, argued that deforestation threatened rainfall and food supply, and compiled the Cyclopaedia of India.