The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c10.2

c10.2

THE INFORMATION that we can obtain from the hymns and from sacrificial formulae relating to the ideas the Vedic authors could have had concerning the play of organic functions, is obviously scanty. Numerous allusions have yielded us the names of diseases, of organs, of parts and elements of the body, but they cannot replace the enunciations of theories. However, people have tried to find in the Veda proofs to show that the fundamental theory of Ayurvedic physiology, that of the three active elements—wind, bile and phlegm—was already known at the time of the composition of hymns.