It is customary to regard ‘tropical medicine’ as a product of the late nineteenth century, ‘its instrument the microscope, its epistemology the germ theory of disease’. The accepted interpretation is that tropical medicine was a European concept: originating in Britain and France and exported to the colonies by pioneering medical scientists. This interpretation is useful inasmuch as ‘tropical medicine’ as a discipline with its own journals, institutions, qualifications, and an exclusive discourse did not emerge until the last decade of the nineteenth century, and partly in response to metropolitan imperatives. But the European perspective of existing histories of ‘tropical medicine’ has obscured important developments in the understanding of diseases in the tropics which took place prior to 1890; most of which occurred in the colonies themselves – and especially in India. In order to distinguish this body of knowledge from its later, institutional incarnation, it will be referred to here as ‘tropical hygiene’: the term most commonly used by medical men in India until the 1890s.

In what follows I use the term ‘academic engineering’ to describe the teaching of engineering within a university or college of higher education: specifically, this differentiates an institutional teaching framework from the broader assimilation of engineering working practices in nineteenth-century Britain by the then standard method of apprenticeship or pupillage, and from the practice of engineering as a profession. The growth of academic engineering, both in terms of student numbers and the variety of courses, profoundly influenced the structure of what we might call ‘practical engineering’, the status of engineering as a profession searching for recognition within society, and the corporate relationship between engineers and places of higher education. These are issues which I will only touch on here.

A resurgence of interest has occurred in ‘Newton's method of approximation’ for deriving the roots of equations, as its repetitive and mechanical character permits ready computer use. If x = α is an approximate root of the equation f(x) = 0, then the method will in most cases give a better approximation as

where f′(x) is the derivative of the function into which α has been substituted. Older books sometimes called it ‘the Newton–Raphson method’, although the method was invented essentially in the above form by Thomas Simpson, who published his account of the method in 1740. However, as if through a time-warp, this invention has migrated back in time and is now matter-of-factly placed by historians in Newton's De analysi of 1669. This paper will describe the steps of this curious historical transposition, and speculate as to its cause.