The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c15.18

c15.18

After a list of symptoms, largely fatal and of signs showing themselves chiefly in fevers¹, the *Coan Prognoses* (beginning from 156), concern themselves with local physical signs approximately classified from the head downwards and in association with various other signs. Now certain groups of symptoms are found identically described, almost word by word, in the *Prorrhétique 1*, with additions in this latter text of a reference to a given patient.² One may *a priori* suppose either that the author of *Prorrhétique 1*, has borrowed elements from *Prénotions de Cos*, adding thereto the names of the patients where he remembered having seen these symptoms, or that the *Coan Prognoses* or some of them, have been gleaned from the collections of clinical notes like the *Prorrhétique 1*, with clinical references being suppressed, or that the two manuals have drawn from a common source. It is the second hypothesis which is confirmed. It is confirmed by the fact that one of the *Coan Prognoses* (543), coinciding with the propositions of *Prorrhétique 1* includes the reference to the patient, discussed by the corresponding proposition of *Prorrhétique 1* (119)³, whereas others do not include the same. It appears, therefore, that the editor of *Prénotions de Cos*, as we have them, has had recourse to *Prorrhétique 1*, but habitually leaving aside, except once, personal indications, and this helps us observe the compilatory process of the composition of the semiological collection of the *Coan Prognoses*. By a similar process particular or exceptional clinical observations could have easily found themselves arranged in pair with regular and frequent morbid facts, and one can understand that detached symptoms, and since then without significative values, be on the contrary presented as important signs, beside other really characteristic signs. A recapitulatory registration of clinical data had taken place with a view to a mode of traditional transmission which appears to be quite analogous to the Mesopotamian mode and which, while not naturally imposing itself, could very well have been inspired by the example of the former, extended up to the Persians and which the Oriental Greeks could not have ignored.