The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c15.80

c15.80

The incorporation among medical symptoms of purely divinatory signs, as those which consist of observations made by the doctor or the exorcist during his passage towards the patient's house, is the first particular analogy between the Accadian manual and our Indian teaching. It is striking for anyone who studies Indian medicine in its totality. Divination in India, at least in the scientific circles, about which we are informed by the principal Sanskrit texts, is in no way a dominant part of its preoccupations. In the *Caraka-saṃhitā* itself, a full chapter (*Sūtrasthāna*, XXIX)¹, which is devoted to the description of the qualities of a good doctor and which gives details of the activity of a quack, enumerates in great detail the knowledge which a doctor worthy of that name must have and it makes no reference to an interpretation of divinatory signs. The texts devoted to various manuals to *nidānas*, that is to say, to the conditions in which diseases appear and develop and which enumerate the symptoms of these diseases and discuss their prognostics, are essentially based on direct clinical observations and on the interpretations of these observations as a function of admitted pathological theories and not, or as a rare exception, on divinatory data. Such data, though present in special sections like the *Indriyasthānas* of Bhela and Caraka or in particular groups of chapters as in Suśruta, and there mixed, as in the Accadian manual, with the enumerations of clinical signs detached from general clinical tables and which are, most of the time, the signs of serious or fatal prognostics, such divinatory data generally remain in the margin of the chief teachings of Indian medicine, which is complete without the same. In short, Sanskrit accounts similar to that of the Accadian manual are admitted in all the principal medical texts of India, but they have therein a place entirely to themselves. They are added to these texts and are not intimately incorporated therein.