The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c14.31

c14.31

It may be stated that the facilities offered by the great unity of the Achaemenian empire to the cultural exchanges between India and the West have proved to be of little effect. A serious error of Herodotos incidentally proves it. The Father of history was a Greek of Asia, he hailed from Halicarnassus, in Caria which was under the Persians. He lived from approximately 480 to 425. A great traveller and a man of great learning, he knew things Iranian and Egyptian particularly well. He was therefore seemingly well-placed for having exact information concerning the Mesopotamian sciences then in use in the Persian empire administered by the functionaries of Babylonian culture. He says, nevertheless, that the Babylonians have no doctors, that among them the sick are exhibited in the public place and that the passers-by give them advice according to their experience (I, 197). His information presents on this point an enormous lacuna; we possess a large number of the fragments of the medical literature of Babylonia¹ and the code of Hammurabi had already, towards 2000 B.C., fixed the fees of the doctors and the punishments they incurred in case of default.²