The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c14.21

c14.21

They took place equally with the Greek colonies of Italy, of Sicily and of Cyrenaica. We know the precise circumstances of the historical relations about which we do not know positively whether they ended in intellectual exchanges but which, at least, offered the requisite conditions for the establishment of such exchanges. This is how at the beginning of the reign of Darius, in the same epoch when the Great King was having the lower course of the Indus reconnoitred by the Greek Skylax, a part of the inhabitants of Barka in Cyrenaica¹ was abducted and transported to Bactriana where lands were allotted to them for founding a new Barka (Herodotos, IV, 204). The presence, at the end of the VIth Cent B.C., of Greeks or of men of Greek culture in India or at the gates of India is thus well attested. The deportees of Barka, of course, never came back to the West but they could have brought western ideas to India. Skylax, for his part, came back from his voyage and wrote a report thereof, which has unfortunately not reached us. Herodotos (III, 125-127) has also recounted the story of the doctor of Crotona, Demokedes.² This doctor who accompanied Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos, when the latter was drawn towards an ambush at Magnesia by the Persian Oretes, was made a prisoner and sent to Susa in 522 B.C. A little later, Darius, suffering from an ankle-sprain and not finding himself any better after eight days of treatment by the Egyptian doctors, was informed of the presence and of the qualities as doctor of Demokedes; the latter was then forced to treat Darius. The doctor was successful and remained, although against his will, attached to Darius. Having, later on, cured the queen Atossa of a suppurated ailment in the chest, he succeeded in making her to persuade Darius to send him under escort to reconnoitre Greece in view of an invasion. There he succeeded in escaping from the Persians and re-entered Crotona where he married the daughter of the famous athlete Milon. He sent word of this marriage to Darius because, says Herodotos, the name of Milon was, at that time, very well-known in the Persian court. Suidas says that he wrote a book on medicine.