Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c16.10

c16.10

The learned Doctor Friend in his History of Physic from the time of Galen, has this remarkable passage: ‘By the earliest account we have of the smallpox, we find it first appeared in Egypt in the time of Omar, successor to Mahomet; though no doubt, since the Greeks knew nothing of it, the Arabians brought it from their own country; and might derive it originally from some of the more distant regions of the East.’ The sagacity of this conclusion, later times and discoveries has fully verified, at the period in which the Augtorrah Bhade scriptures of the Gentoos were promulgated, (according to the Bramins three thousand three hundred and sixty-six years ago) this disease must then have been of some standing, as those scriptures institute a form of divine worship, with Poojahs or offerings, to a female divinity, styled by the common people Gootee ka Tagooran (the goddess of spots), whose aid and patronage are invoked during the continuance of the smallpox season, also in the measles, and every cutaneous eruption that is in the smallest degree epidemical. Due weight being given to this circumstance, the long duration of the disease in Indostan will manifestly appear; and we may add to the sagacious conjecture just quoted, that not only the Arabians, but the Egyptians also, by their early commerce with India through the Red Sea and Gulf of Mocha, most certainly derived originally the small pox (and probably the measles likewise) from that country, where those diseases have reigned from the earliest known times.