The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c15.23

c15.23

We have taken note, a little earlier, of the Accadian preposition, "If his nose is cold, he will die", and supposed that such indications of prognostic could be held valid only after they had been completed by the knowledge of the conditions of their validity. Now we read in *Prénotions de Cos*: "Ears cold, transparent and contracted, fatal sign" (188) and exactly like the Accadian manual, here also nothing indicates in the context the clinical table under which this sign can have a value, which evidently it does not have it itself. But Littré in his translation refers to a passage of *Prognostics* (2, t. II, p. 115), which yields us the key to the enigma posed by the presence, among the *Coan Prognoses* of a proposition, which in itself is so insignificant and so false. This proposition detaches, simply for classifying it among the symptoms furnished by the ears, a sign, which in the *Prognostics*, is part of an entire clinical table whose significance is finely discussed over there. It refers to the examination of the face of the patient in serious diseases and not to that of the ears of no matter which subject, as one would have believed on reading only the *Coan Prognoses*. The comparison of the physiognomy of the patient is to be made with that of normal persons and chiefly with the physiognomy habitual to the patient himself. It is also specified that the patient will have to be asked if he had felt various types of fatigue or debilitating causes (prolonged awakening, strong diarrhoea, hunger). It is only when the possibility of these conditions, in themselves capable of producing alarming symptoms, is eliminated that one will relate the symptoms in question to the violence of the trouble and will hold them as really significant of a fatal prognostic. It is only then and when it is associated with the totality of other described signs, that the coldness and the contraction (?) of the ears can take on the value of a fatal sign.