Short answers, pulled from the story.
Garcia de Orta (1501-1568) was a Portuguese physician, herbalist, and naturalist who worked primarily in Goa and Bombay. He is considered a pioneer of tropical medicine, pharmacognosy, and ethnobotany, and produced the earliest European treatise on the medicinal and economic plants of India.
His book Colóquios dos simples e drogas da India, published in Goa in 1563, covered the simples and drugs of India. It was structured as a dialogue and introduced European readers to many substances that had been unknown or misunderstood, including correcting the false belief that tamarind came from a palm tree.
Garcia de Orta was posthumously convicted of Judaism. On the 4th of December, 1580, his remains were exhumed and burned alongside an effigy at an auto-da-fé in Goa. His sister Catarina had already been burned at the stake on the 25th of October, 1569.
Carolus Clusius discovered the book in early 1564 and translated it into Latin, producing an abridged version in 1567 that went through multiple editions including 1574, 1579, 1582, 1584, 1593, 1595, and 1605-6. An Italian translation followed in 1576.
Garcia de Orta was the first European to describe the symptoms of several Asian tropical diseases, notably cholera. He also performed the first recorded autopsy in India on a cholera victim.
Garcia de Orta was of Jewish ancestry. His parents were Spanish Jews from Valencia de Alcántara who fled to Portugal after the 1492 expulsion and were forcibly converted to Christianity in 1497, becoming Cristãos Novos (New Christians). Fearing the Portuguese Inquisition, Garcia left Lisbon in 1534, and after his death his remains were exhumed and burned by the Goa Inquisition.