Frederic J. Mouat

Frederic John Mouat (1816 to 1897) was a British surgeon, chemist and prison reformer who spent three decades in India. Born in Maidstone, Kent, the son of an army surgeon, he trained in London and Edinburgh, joined the Indian Medical Service in 1840 and taught chemistry and materia medica at the Bengal Medical College. He tested chaulmoogra oil as a treatment for leprosy and in 1849 published an illustrated atlas of human anatomy with notes in Urdu. As Inspector-General of jails in lower Bengal he argued for remunerative prison labour, and in 1857 he explored the Andaman Islands as a possible convict settlement, which led to the founding of Port Blair. He also campaigned for the first Indian universities and later served as president of the Royal Statistical Society.