The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c15.87

c15.87

Whatever be the resemblance of the Accadian manual with Indian medical data concerning possession as a cause of diseases, the idea of different types of possession shown by specific symptoms goes up much higher in India than the scientific medical texts. In the *Hippocratic Collection* the existence of similar ideas is shown by the very fact that the text *On the Sacred Diseases* gives its examples while rejecting them.³ But here the concordance between the Greek way of posing the diagnosis of possession with the Accadian and Indian ones remains very general. It is only the 40th tablet of the Accadian text which shows special similarities, with the post-Vedic texts regarding the diagnosis of possession of infants, which has been pointed out by us. These similarities, the only ones having the possibility of not being simply explained in terms of universal belief in demoniac seizures, are given on the Indian side by texts of the same stratum as provide the similarities in the domain of presages obtained on the path to the patient’s house or which details the mode of enumerating morbid phenomena having fatal prognostics, deliberately separated from complete clinical tables of which, in reality, they necessarily constitute a part.