Colóquios dos simples e drogas da Índia (García de Orta)
- Date
- 1563 · confidence high
- Place
- Goa, India
- Credited to
- García de Orta
- Field
- Life & health
What was discovered
A work in the form of dialogues published in Goa in 1563, the fruit of decades of direct observation of the drugs, plants and diseases of India. It contains the first European clinical description of Asiatic cholera and corrects Dioscorides and Avicenna with first-hand experience.
Orta, a Portuguese physician from a converted Jewish family, died in 1568; the Inquisition exhumed and burned his remains in 1580 for judaizing. It counts among the first works printed in India.
What it led to
- Clusius's Latin abridgement (1567), which spread his work across Europe
- later treatises by Cristóbal Acosta and Linschoten on the flora and spices of the East
- a foundation of modern tropical medicine and pharmacognosy
Built on
- Systematic pharmacopoeia (Dioscorides' De materia medica)c. 65 CE
- Dioscorides's Materia Medica