Gabriel Boughton and William Hamilton did great service to and conferred great political benefits upon the Company and their country, but the charters granted by the Musalman rulers to these officers were earned by purely professional work. The first medical officer who attained eminence in a sphere other than professional was John Zephaniah Holwell, Member of Council and temporary Governor of Bengal. But, as the careers of these officers have already been sketched in previous papers,[1] it would be superfluous to detail them again now.
For half a century after the formation of the Service on 1st January 1764, no medical officer appears to have met with much success in an extra-professional career. In the first twenty years a good many assistant-surgeons drifted into the combatant ranks, but only one appears to have attained to any particular success in his new profession, and he was not of the first rank. Peter MacGregor Murray went out to India as an Assistant-Surgeon about 1773, but soon after obtained a combatant commission, and rose to be Adjutant-General of the Bengal Army, in which capacity he is said to have accumulated a fortune of £200,000.[2] He left India, on retirement from the Service, in 1803, and went home on the Indiaman Lord Nelson, which was taken off Ferrol, on 14th August 1803, by the French privateer Belloae. Colonel Murray was killed in the hand to-hand-fight which ensued when the privateer boarded the Indiaman. In the same fight fell another I. M. S. officer going home on furlough, Surgeon William Spottiswoode, brother of the Captain of the Lord Nelson. The Indiaman was retaken, eleven days later, on 25th August 1803, by the Colossus line of battleship.
The most successful of these soldier-surgeons was Francis Balfour, who entered the Bengal Army as Assistant-Surgeon on 3rd July 1769, was appointed Ensign eight days later, 11th July 1769, became Lieutenant on 26th June 1771, and on 10th August 1777 reverted to the Medical Department on receiving promotion to the rank of Surgeon. He was lucky in promotion throughout, becoming a member of the Medical Board on 20th December 1787, with only eighteen years' service, and holding that appointment for nearly twenty years, till he retired on 16th September 1807. He lived at least ten years longer. He was a voluminous author, his best-known work being "A Treatise on Sol-Lunar Influence in Fevers," which went through four editions (1784, 1795, 1815, 1816), and was translated into German in 1786. He was for some time Surgeon to Warren Hastings.
Charles Chaston Assey (entered the Service 19th September 1799) was for three years, 1814-1817, Chief Secretary to the Government of Java, while that island was in British possession. He died in Fort William on 2lst March 1821.
John Crawfurd (entered 24th May 1803), was one of the most successful of the I. M. S. officers who have adopted a political career. In 1808 he was posted to Penang, and in 1811 accompanied the expedition to Java, which resulted in the reduction of that island. For the next six years, 1811 to 1817, he was in political employment in Java. From 1817 to 1820 he was on furlough, and from 1820 to 1823 was at the head of an Embassy from the Company to the Courts of Siam and Cochin-China. In 1823 he succeeded Sir Stamford Raffles as Administrator of Singapur, and held that appointment till 1826, when he went on an embassy to the Court of Ava. He retired on 12th July 1827, when holding the post of Civil Commissioner, Pegu; and lived at home for over forty years, dying at his house in South Kensington on 11th May 1868. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 7th May 1818. Crawfurd wrote several books on the countries of Further India, which were for long the recognised authorities on the subject: "Histoiy of the Indian Archipelago," 3 vols., 1820; "Account of an Embassy to Siam and Cochin-China," 1828; "Journal of Embassy to the Court of Ava," 1829; "Grammar and Dictionary of the Malay Language," 1852; and "A Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Islands," 1866.
John Leyden, the next name in chronological order, was one of the most talented men who ever came to India. Born at Denholm in Roxburgh on 8th September 1775, he was at Edinburgh University from 1790 to 1797. In May 1798 he was licensed as a preacher at St. Andrews, by the Church of Scotland, and presumably was the only clergyman who ever entered the Indian Medical Service, though a few men have been ordained after retirement. Not proving successful as a preacher, he turned his attention to literature, helping Sir Walter Scott with his "Border Minstrelsy," and editing "Scottish descriptive poems," and the "Scots Magazine" in 1802. In the same year he was offered an appointment as Assistant-Surgeon in the Madras Army, contingent on his getting a medical qualification, and succeeded in getting the degree of M. D. of St. Andrews University, as well as the diploma of L. R. C. S., Edinburgh, within six months, towards the end of 1802. He landed in Madras on 19th August 1803. The next three years he spent chiefly in travelling, in Mysore, Cochin, Malabar, and Penang.
He was appointed Professor of Hindustani, in the College of Fort William, in 1806, Judge of the 24-Parganas about January 1807, and in January 1809 Commissioner of the Court of Requests, Calcutta. At the end of 1810 he was appointed Assay Master of the Calcutta Mint, but in 1811 went with the expedition for the reduction of Java, and died at Cornelis, Batavia, on 28th
