The term daktar used as a designation to particularly and solely describe practitioners of a separate system of medicine had not caught on in printed Bengali texts till the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet, there is no doubt that a significant number of Bengalis had come into contact with ‘western’ medicine well before that. The eighteenth-century ‘Black Doctors’ and ‘Compounders’, and later, in the nineteenth century, the many physicians employed temporarily during the cholera epidemic of the 1820s, all had a chance to practice some form of ‘western’ medicine or other. The lack of detailed archival evidence, however, makes it, as yet, difficult to reconstruct what sort of medicine these early pioneers practised or how significant their role was within the extant economy of healing.

A relatively more detailed picture of the actual practice of early Bengali practice of ‘western’ medicine emerges from the 1840s. This picture presents a highly diverse and heterogeneous world. The men involved came from a wide range of backgrounds and had a wide variety of skills. They also occupied very different positions within the world of daktari medicine. The historiographic recovery of this plurality, however, is often confounded by an uneven archival record and the codes through which texts preserve biographical information.