The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c11.7

c11.7

Therefore Āyurveda has chiefly inherited from the physiological speculations and from the anatomical notions of the Veda. It has preserved a part of the nosological nomenclature but has almost entirely abandoned ancient therapeutics. It has thus drawn chiefly for doctrinal elements on Vedic speculations to establish its physiological theories, the one concerning the primordial rôle in the body of the wind of nature, and also the one concerning the rôle of water and fire, the latter being represented by bile. But the theory of three active elements of the organism which, on their equilibrium being disturbed or because of functional anomalies, become its three elements of trouble (*tridoṣa*), the wind, the phlegm and the bile, had not been constituted at the times of the Vedas themselves. In fact the notion of phlegm hardly prefigures in the *Atharvaveda* which limits itself to mentioning an oedomatous affection whose name will be, later on, used to designate occasionally the phlegm itself. It is only in a Brahmanic text, really ancient and going as far back as the first centuries after 1000 B.C., the *Śatapatha-Brāhmaṇa*, that the phlegm is named under one of its principal names, the *śleṣman*. But even here phlegm is not presented as an essential element of the organism.