James Ranald Martin

Sir James Ranald Martin (1796 to 1874) was a British military surgeon who served in India with the East India Company. Born on the Isle of Skye, he entered the Bengal Medical Service as an assistant surgeon in 1817 and reached Calcutta that year. He saw the effects of cholera among the garrison at Fort William, was sent to Orissa during an outbreak of malignant fever, and served in the First Burmese War from 1823 to 1826. These experiences convinced him that disease affected native populations and Europeans differently, and that the medical features of a territory should be mapped as carefully as its topography. His notes on the medical topography of Calcutta, and his 1836 report urging public health measures and a clean water supply for the city, helped start a genre of medico-topographical surveys linking climate, health and development. He became president of the Company's medical board in 1843, rewrote James Johnson's treatise on tropical diseases in 1856, and sat on the Sanitary Commission whose report appeared in 1863. Reports in this tradition also recorded deforestation and fed into the creation of India's forest departments.