Thomas Christie (physician)

[2] After education in the University of Aberdeen, he entered the service of the East India Company as a surgeon to one of their regiments, and was sent to Trincomalee in 1797.

He served in the Kandyan War of 1803, worked hard for several years at medical improvements in several parts of Ceylon, and returned from the East in February 1810, and immediately proceeded M.D.

[3] At the end of the same year Christie became a Licentiate of the College of Physicians, at once began private practice at Cheltenham, and in 1811 published there An Account of the Introduction, Progress, and Success of Vaccination in Ceylon.

The natives used to abandon their villages and the sick, and at Errore, Christie found the huts in ruins from the inroad of elephants, bears, and hogs which had trampled down all the fences and gardens, and had eaten the stores of grain and some of the bodies of the dead or dying.

After some unsuccessful efforts active vaccine lymph was obtained from Bombay, whither it had come from an English surgeon at Baghdad, by way of Bussorah.