Robert Wight MD FRS FLS (6 July 1796 – 26 May 1872) was a Scottish surgeon in the East India Company, whose professional career was spent entirely in southern India, where his greatest achievements were in botany – as an economic botanist and leading taxonomist in south India. He contributed to the introduction of American cotton. As a taxonomist he described 110 new genera and 1267 new species of flowering plants. He employed Indian botanical artists to illustrate many plants collected by himself and Indian collectors he trained. Some of these illustrations were published by William Hooker in Britain, but from 1838 he published a series of illustrated works in Madras including the uncoloured, six-volume Icones Plantarum Indiae Orientalis (1838–53) and two hand-coloured, two-volume works, the Illustrations of Indian Botany (1838–50) and Spicilegium Neilgherrense (1845–51). By the time he retired from India in 1853 he had published 2464 illustrations of Indian plants.
Life and work
Early life
Wight was the son of a solicitor (Writer to the Signet) in Edinburgh who came from a line of East Lothian tenant farmers. He was born at Milton, East Lothian, the ninth of twelve siblings. He was educated at home until the age of eleven after which he studied at the Royal High School in Edinburgh. He obtained a surgeon's diploma in 1816 from the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. He trained at Edinburgh University, studying botany under Daniel Rutherford in 1816, and graduating MD in 1818. It has been claimed that he worked as a ship's surgeon for two years and went on a few voyages, including one to the USA but this has been questioned.
Early work in India
In 1819 Wight went to India as an Assistant Surgeon in the service of the East India Company, serving initially with the 21st (afterwards 42nd, which was later commanded by his brother Colonel James Wight) Madras Native Infantry. His devotion to botany was clear from the start and his earliest collections were made around Samalkota, Rajahmundry and Masulipatam in the Northern Circars in the present-day state of Andhra Pradesh. After periods in the Public Cattle Depot at Mysore (Seringapatam) and with the 33rd Madras Native Infantry he was, in January 1826, appointed to succeed Dr James Shuter in the post of Madras Naturalist. In 1828 the Governor of Madras, Stephen Rumbold Lushington, scrapped the Naturalist's post, and its collections (including Wight's own, and earlier ones of Patrick Russell and the Tranquebar Missionaries) were sent to the Company headquarters in London. Wight was redeployed to regimental duties as garrison surgeon at Nagapattinam. From here, in 1828, he began a productive correspondence with William Hooker, Professor of Botany at Glasgow University, sending him plant specimens and drawings by his Indian artist Rungiah. Earlier collections from around Madras up to Vellore and from Samalkota and Rajahmundry, sent to Professor Robert Graham in Edinburgh had been unacknowledged and, though said to have been lost at sea, are probably the Andhra Pradesh specimens which are in the herbarium of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.