The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c15.10

c15.10

This part, written according to a prototype of Babylonia, is, properly speaking, an *aide-mémoire* of semiology, enumerating the symptoms, organwise, going from the head to the feet and indicating their significance. Most of the time, it is a case of isolated symptoms and its medical value is nil. It will be even difficult to believe that the Mesopotamian doctors could have preserved, for a long time, in their traditional lists of significative symptoms indications such as these: "If his nose is cold: he will die" (Table VI, 3) or: "If the tip of his nose is yellow, he will die" (ibid., 25). One should suppose that probably some complementary oral instruction existed or that the indications furnished by parallel manuals specified the conditions in which similar symptoms could become significant. Besides, these conditions are indicated in certain cases: they are constituted by the presence of other symptoms associated with the one referring to the part of the body in question, that is to say, in the existence of clinical entities or syndromes of recognised individuality. Here the manual does assume a really medical character distinguishing it from the collections of divination. For example, certain crises of convulsion are described in these terms: "If the neck of the patient continuously turns towards right, if his hands and his feet are clenched (?), if his eyes are closed and upturned, if slaver flows out of his mouth, if he snores: that is a crisis of high disease (*antasubbū*)" (Table X, 1). There are even indications of differential diagnosis, because the text immediately adds: "If, when seized by the crisis, he remains conscious: it is sure; if (on the contrary), at the time of the seizure by the crisis, he becomes unconscious: that is not sure”. This distinction, as has been ably noted by Mr. Labat, appears to refer to the differential diagnosis of epilepsy and other crises of convulsion, the loss of consciousness being characteristic in epilepsy. In any case, the still more characteristic symptom, regarding the absence of the memory of the epileptic accident, is not indicated and the given description nohow constitutes a complete and general *tableau* of the disease. Descriptions of this type prove that certain diseases were the object of efforts for nosological individualisation and not that these efforts had been in an advanced stage among the Mesopotamians as they had been a little later, among the Greeks and the Indians.