The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c6.138

c6.138

This system is comparable to some of the medical systems of Greek antiquity, which were also elaborated in the centuries preceding the Christian era. The collection of Hippocrates contains the elements of the doctrine which was fixed later with a rigour comparable to that of the Ayurvedic theory and which relates to four humours: blood, bile, atrabile and phlegm, corresponding to four chief elements and to their properties, hot, dry, cold and humid. The existence, with regard to the humoral doctrine of the Greek world, of the Ayurvedic system of the three doṣas should evidently be recognised as one of the facts dominating the general history of ancient medicine. Both of them have been simultaneously recognised as authoritative since antiquity, one in the Indian world and the other in the Western world. Both of them are still followed. The Greek doctrine survives in the countries of Islam. The Indian system not only continues in India, but at present it is even undergoing a vigorous renaissance. It has been adopted since an early date, in all those countries which have been under the influence of India, as far as Mongolia, from which it has come, towards the end of the last century and the beginning of the present one, to provoke in Russia an infatuation for the medical system called the "Tibetan", because it had reached the Mongols through the Tibetans.