Restrictions to Access

This collection is not available for immediate or same day access. Please contact Research and Instructional Service staff at wilsonlibrary@unc.edu to discuss options for consulting this collection.

Copyright Notice

Copyright is retained by the authors of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], in the William Picard Jacocks Collection of Olas #12035, Rare Book Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Acquisitions Information

Received from William Picard Jacocks in circa 1955 (Acc. 103774).

Additional Descriptive Resources

See A census of Indic manuscripts in the United States and Canada compiled by H. I. Poleman (1967), which includes UNC Chapel Hill's holdings.

Sensitive Materials Statement

Manuscript collections and archival records may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations, the North Carolina Public Records Act (N.C.G.S. § 132 1 et seq.), and Article 7 of the North Carolina State Personnel Act (Privacy of State Employee Personnel Records, N.C.G.S. § 126-22 et seq.). Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in this collection without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assumes no responsibility.

Encoded by: Laura Hart, January 2020

Since August 2017, we have added ethnic and racial identities for individuals and families represented in collections. To determine identity, we rely on self-identification; other information supplied to the repository by collection creators or sources; public records, press accounts, and secondary sources; and contextual information in the collection materials. Omissions of ethnic and racial identities in finding aids created or updated after August 2017 are an indication of insufficient information to make an educated guess or an individual's preference for identity information to be excluded from description. When we have misidentified, please let us know at wilsonlibrary@unc.edu.

The following terms from Library of Congress Subject Headings suggest topics, persons, geography, etc. interspersed through the entire collection; the terms do not usually represent discrete and easily identifiable portions of the collection--such as folders or items.

Clicking on a subject heading below will take you into the University Library's online catalog.

• Buddhist literature.
• India--History--18th century.
• Indic literature.
• Jacocks, William Picard, 1877-1965.
• Manuscripts, Indic.
• Medicine, Ayurvedic.
• Sri Lanka--History--18th century.

William Picard Jacocks (1877-1965) from Bertie County, N.C., was a physician and public health specialist who worked in India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1914 to 1942.

Eighteenth-century Sinhalese olas, palm leaf manuscripts, collected by white American physician William Picard Jacocks (1877-1965) when he served as a public health specialist in India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) between 1914 and 1942. The texts are chiefly Buddhist sermons and discourse. Also included are the Yogaratnākara treatise on the Āyurveda system of medicine, the Vattorupota collection of medicinal recipes, and a treatise on astrology.

For more information on the texts, see A Census of Indic manuscripts in the United States and Canada compiled by H. I. Poleman (1967), which includes UNC Chapel Hill's olas holdings.