The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c13.46

c13.46

We have briefly pointed out the resemblances between the *Timaeus* and the Indian ideas found at quite a late date. We have chiefly stopped to look at patent similarities between the medical doctrine of the *Timaeus* and the Ayurvedic pathology whose essential elements, as we know, date from the Vedic epoch and which became a system between the epoch of the *Śatapatha-brāhmaṇa* and that of the grammarian Kātyāyana, i.e., approximately between the VIIth century and the end of the IVth century B.C. Plato lived from 428 or 417 to 347 B.C. and the *Timaeus* belongs to the end of the life of Plato, to the second quarter of the IVth century. On his side, the Hippocratic manual *On Breaths*, whose pneumatism has been found by us to be comparable to that of India, although not dated, belongs to a period quite near that of Plato and, in any case, to a period before that of Aristotle and of Alexander.