John Anderson

John Anderson was a Scottish naturalist, anatomist, and explorer who was born in 1833 and died in 1900. He trained in medicine in Edinburgh, where he studied anatomy under John Goodsir, and he went on to build a career that joined science, travel, and writing.

He is especially remembered for his work in India, where he served as the first curator of the Indian Museum in Calcutta. His scientific expeditions took him across South and Southeast Asia, and those journeys fed directly into his books, including Mandalay to Momien and English Intercourse With Siam in the Seventeenth Century.

Anderson wrote with the eye of a working scientist, but his books also preserve the excitement of exploration and the nineteenth-century hunger to describe distant places in detail. For listeners today, his work offers both firsthand travel narrative and a window into the history of natural history.