William Roxburgh

William Roxburgh (1751 to 1815) was a Scottish surgeon and botanist who spent most of his career in India with the East India Company. Born in Ayrshire, he studied medicine and surgery at Edinburgh, where he learnt surgery under Alexander Monro and botany under John Hope, and took his first medical doctorate there in 1776. He joined the Madras Medical Service as an assistant surgeon that same year and rose to surgeon in 1780. From 1789 he served as Company Botanist and Naturalist at Madras, and from 1793 he was superintendent of the Company garden at Sibpur near Calcutta. He is remembered as the founding father of Indian botany: he described many Indian plant species with drawings by local artists, worked on economic crops such as sugarcane, indigo and hemp, kept long meteorological records, and was the first to document the Ganges river dolphin. His Flora Indica was published after his death. He died in Edinburgh in 1815.