Travels in the Mogul Empire (Bernier) 6.8.1

6.8.1

Whether these modes of treatment be judicious, I leave to our learned physicians to decide ; I shall only remark that they are successful in Hindoustan, and that the Mogol and Mahometan physicians, who follow the rules of Avicenna and Averroes, adopt them no less than do those of the Gentiles, especially in regard to abstinence from meat broth. The Mogols, it is true, are rather more given to the practice of bleeding than the Gentiles; for where they apprehend the inflammations just mentioned, they generally bleed once or twice, not in the trifling manner of the modern practitioners of Goa and Paris, but copiously, like the ancients, taking eighteen or twenty ounces of blood, sometimes even to fainting; thus frequently subduing the disease at the commencement, according to the advice of Galen, and as I have witnessed in several cases. It is not surprising that the Gentiles understand nothing of anatomy. They never open the body either of man or beast, and those in our household always ran away, with amazement and horror, whenever I opened a living goat or sheep for the purpose of explaining to my Agah the circulation of the blood, and showing him the vessels, discovered by Pecquet, through which the chyle is conveyed to the right ventricle of the heart. Yet notwithstanding their profound ignorance of the subject, they affirm that the number of veins in the human body is five thousand, neither more nor less; just as if they had carefully reckoned them.