page_title: Ernest Hanbury Hankin
section_title: Other areas of work
hierarchical_section_title: Ernest Hanbury Hankin / India / Other areas of work
caption_attribution_description: Octagonal patterns in Mughal architecture
context_page_description: Ernest Hanbury Hankin was an English bacteriologist, aeronautical theorist and naturalist. Working mainly in India, he studied malaria, cholera and other diseases. He is often considered as among the first to detect bacteriophage activity and suggested that their presence in the waters of the Ganga and Jamuna rivers may have had a role in restricting the outbreaks of cholera. Apart from his professional studies, he took considerable interest in the Islamic geometric patterns in Mughal architecture as well as the soaring flight of birds, culture and its impact on education. He was sometimes criticized for being overzealous in his research methods.
context_section_description: During the thirty years that he spent in India, Hankin took interest not just in tropical diseases but also the effects of opium and the action of cobra venom, working sometimes in collaboration with Albert Calmette and Waldemar Haffkine. Outside of his health related research he took an interest in such diverse topics as the fauna inhabiting the dome of the Taj Mahal, insect camouflage and its military application, native folklore and art.
  Hankin protested the introduction of the 1876 British Act against vivisection into India. He wrote that it came in the way of scientific research and that the legal measures should only be aimed to control cruelty imposed by traditional Indian practices noting that "so far as Englishmen of science are concerned the prevention of wanton or unnecessary cruelty to animals might safely be left to their good taste and good feeling."
  While in India, Hankin studied the Islamic geometric patterns that he observed, publishing some of them in 1905. His main findings only found publication from 1925, after his return to the UK, when "The Drawing of Geometric Patterns in Saracenic Art" finally appeared in Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India, under the editorship of J. F. Blakiston. This and later writings have influenced computer scientists and mathematicians in recent years, notably Craig S. Kaplan.
caption: Octagonal Mughal patterns drawn by Hankin
exif: {}