The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c4.2

c4.2

Moved by this spirit, a number of the partisans of Ayurveda have written about the identification of modern concepts with those of Ayurveda. This is how it is desired to recognise in certain organic elements mentioned by the Ayurvedic texts, the elements defined by present-day physiology and geological Chemistry. For instance, as the action of *prāṇa* is invoked by Ayurveda for explaining the physiological movements of the organs, and as modern Nerurology talks about nervous influx, some have claimed that *prāṇa* is that nervous influx and that modern Nerurology has merely rediscovered what Ayurveda had already taught. This is how, once again, a substance like ojas, which plays an important rôle in the organism, according to the Physiology of Ayurveda, has been identified with albumin, because albumin appears as playing a rôle of fundamental importance in the same organism. Numerous other identifications in detail or identifications of theories explaining the same phenomena proposed on both sides by the Ayurvedic authors and modern medical men have, once again, been recently put forward. But it should be evident to everybody that the majority of these identifications cannot be defended because the elements mistakenly held to be the same, as they serve to explain the same functions, are altogether differently defined on the two sides. It is certainly much more important to note that the Ayurvedic authors have recognised numerous problems posed by life and by the inter-play of pathological functions or by their alterations and that they have sought to solve them by means of rational explanations, on the basis of data obtained from observations available to them, as can always be done by the Physiologists, Biologists and the Pathologists with the help of data gathered by them. But it is absolutely unwarranted to claim that the explanations thus offered are equivalent and that the more ancient ones had already the value of the latter ones; indeed they have an absolute and definitive value. Now in the European science of the Middle Ages the maintenance of any liquid in a tube, first filled and then turned upside down on a vat containing the same liquid, had been sought to be explained by means of the property of nature having horror of the vacuum. Later on Physics, having discovered atmospheric pressure, has explained the same phenomenon because of the atmospheric pressure. But no one has, however, come to the conclusion that mediaeval science had already known the atmospheric pressure and had named it, "horror of the vaccum".