John Zephaniah Holwell (17 September 1711 – 5 November 1798) was a surgeon, an employee of the British East India Company, and a temporary Governor of Bengal (1760). He was also one of the first Europeans to study Indian antiquities and was an early advocate of animal rights and vegetarianism.
Biography
Holwell was a survivor of the Black Hole of Calcutta, June 1756, the incident in which British citizens and others were crammed into a small poorly ventilated chamber overnight, with many deaths. Holwell's account of this incident (1757) obtained wide circulation in England and some claim this gained support for the East India Company's conquest of India. His account of the incident was not publicly questioned during his lifetime nor for more than a century after his death. However, in recent years, his version of the event has been called into question by many historians.
thumb|left|Holwell's monument in Calcutta
Holwell has also become an important source for modern historians of medicine, as a result of his description of the practice of smallpox variolation in eighteenth-century Bengal, An Account of the Manner of Inoculating for the Small Pox in the East Indies with Some Observations on the Practice and Mode of Treating that Disease in those Parts (London, 1767).
Born in Dublin, he grew up in London, and studied medicine at Guy's Hospital. He gained employment as a surgeon in the British East India Company and was sent to India in 1732. He served in this capacity until 1749. In 1751, he was appointed as zemindar of the Twenty-four Parganas District of Bengal. He came to believe that the Hindu scriptures completed and unlocked a secret meaning of the Bible. He wrote about this in the second and third volumes of his work Interesting Historical Events, Relative to the Provinces of Bengal, and the Empire of Indostan (1765–1771).