Edgar Thurston

Edgar Thurston (1855–1935) was an English physician, zoologist and ethnographer. Trained in medicine at King's College London, he went to India as a professor at Madras Medical College and from 1885 to 1908 was superintendent of the Madras Government Museum, which he turned into a center of anthropological research, and superintendent of the ethnographic survey of the Madras Presidency. His Castes and Tribes of Southern India (1909), in seven volumes with K. Rangachari, Ethnographic Notes in Southern India (1906) and Omens and Superstitions of Southern India (1912) record the region's peoples in detail. In retirement in Cornwall he wrote on the county's botany and gardens.