The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c5.13

c5.13

This is what we have tried to do for the medical doctrines. It is only after having put them in their place in the current of Indian thought, where they arose, and after having determined their antecedents that we could proceed to compare them with similar Greek doctrines. We will strive chiefly to seize their first manifestation or the formative elements in the oldest texts, so that we can go as far as possible in the historical past of ideas. We will be led to observe that a number of ideas, which had been believed to be borrowed by India from the Hellenic science, as long as they had been studied only in classical manuals more recent than the great Greek works, have, in fact, in India more ancient bases than these great works and that the two medical traditions, Indian and Greek, have had a parallel development. We will have, therefore, to envisage their eventual exchanges in the light of those historical conditions which have made them possible.