The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c11.36

c11.36

We thus reach the conclusion that classical Indian medicine which is found in a fully constituted form in the didactic manuals belonging to the environs of the Christian era, has its essential bases (doctrines of wind and of the breaths, of the fiery nature of bile, etc.) in the ancient Vedic texts, anterior to the formation of the Greek science, but that it has been elaborated and constituted as a system during the period of the efflorescence of Greek science and parallel to it. We have now to examine the analogies and the eventual relationship the two could have had.