Page:A History of the Indian Medical Service, 1600-1913 Vol 1.djvu/15

PREFACE but it has been found necessary to include a good deal of general history in the earlier chapters, for the due illustration of the special subject. Neither is it a history of the rise and progress of modern medicine in India. The only chapters which deal with professional matters are Chapter XLII, Hospitals, and Chapter XLIII, Medical Education, with a few paragraphs in Chapter XL, General Remarks. The aim of the book is to describe the origin and development of the Indian Medical Service.

The work has no pretensions to originality, but is altogether a compilation from older sources. It is difficult to be original in writing history. Indeed, originality in history would come perilously near to fiction. My aim in the compilation has been, not to make an interesting book, so much as to put together a mass of facts. In the compilation I have acted on Moliere's maxim, Je prends mon Men oh je le trouve, and have borrowed from every source, with which I was acquainted, where I could find matter bearing on my subject. The most important sources of information have been the MS. records of the India Office and of the Calcutta Record Office, and the Calcutta Gazette; but I have also got much of interest from a large number of previous writers, whose works are mentioned in the Bibliography. Those from which I have borrowed most freely, I hope in all cases with due acknowledgment, are the late Mr. W. N. Sainsbury's Calendar of State Papers, Miss Sainsbury's Court Minutes of the E.I. Co., Mr. S. C. Hill's Bengal in 1756-57, Colonel H. D. Love's Vestiges of Old Madras, and The English Factories in India, and other works by Mr. W. Foster.

It may be thought that in some instances the book strays somewhat far afield from its subject, the history of the I.M.S., till It resembles the philosopher's treatise, De omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis. Such episodes as Dance's action with Linois (Chapter XXXII), the relations of George III with the Fair Quaker, (Chapter XLII), and the exhumation of the skeletons of Anne Boleyn and of other victims of the block in the Tower (Chapter XXXI), have, indeed, little to do with the I.M.S. All three of these episodes, however, have some slight connection