The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c13.14

c13.14

The passage terminates with an enumeration of fevers. The continuous ones are due to fire; the daily ones are due to air; those occurring every third day to water, slower than fire and air; those occurring every fourth day are due to earth, which is slower still. The sources of this pathology have not been fully elucidated.² Mr. Rivaud asks himself if Plato had not accepted from all sides different hypotheses which he had not sought to reconcile. It is certain that one could find, scattered in various texts, the elements of the doctrine of the *Timaeus* and that uptil now no Greek medical text, grouping these elements in the manner in which he has grouped them, has been pointed out. The Hippocratic manuals present different pathological theories but they recognise most often the action of the four elements (which is also done by Plato in his description of the first class of the diseases), or of four properties, the cold and the hot, the dry and the humid (cf., *On Ancient Medicine*, 1, which combats this theory); or of four humours, blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile (*On the Nature of Man*, 4) or blood, bile, water and phlegm (*On Generation*, 3 and *On Diseases*, IV, 32); or of bile and of phlegm (*On Diseases*, II, 2), etc. Only in Indian medicine is found in the form of a received doctrine a pathogeny similar to that of Plato, some details being in concordance on the two sides, some being different.