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The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c7.s1: 1. The First Data

The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c7.s1

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1. The First Data

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It is only since 1922 that the excavations carried out by R. D. Banerji and the Archaeological Survey of India, have brought to light, at Mohen-jo-Daro in Sindh, the remains of the civilization known as the Indus Valley Civilization. These remains are related to the ones revealed by the excavations at Harappa in the Panjab. Despite the absence of any real decipherment of the inscriptions found there and despite the incomplete state of excavatory work of great depth, this discovery has already given rise to a multitude of fantastic theories. However many facts are already accepted; at least everybody agrees on points of major importance. The old age of the ruins is attested to by the thickness of the alluvial stratum which had covered them and also by the discoveries made outside India, at Kish, at Ur, at Tello and at Susa in the strata going to 3rd millennium B.C. of seals manifestly coming from the Indus or belonging to the same type of those of the Indus.

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Evidently we can know nothing positive concerning the position of medicine in the Indus civilization. But the ruins of the extremely large town excavated at Mohen-jo-daro are particularly remarkable in view of the uncovered remains of the large-scale works of public sanitation. All the houses have a place for washing. In poorer houses this consists of an ordinary room with a water-proof floor sloping towards a drain. In bigger houses, there are proper bath-rooms. The drains of the houses end in a system of street-drains which is spread over all the streets. The biggest building contains a bath of 55 meters by 33 meters, with a tank of 13 meters by 7 meters, having a depth of 2.5 meters and with many subsidiary constructions manifestly used for the purpose of baths.

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It is asked if the big bath could be compared to the thermal baths of the Romans, used for hygiene, hydrotherapy and sports or was it meant for religious purposes. Of these two the former hypothesis is much more probable as the importance of the individual installations shows very well the liking of the habitants for ablutions and bath.

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But did the water used in the big bath have any medicinal properties? Nothing allows us to suppose so. If the big bath were the only hydrotherapic installation favoured in the town, one could think so. But the individual installations could not have been uniquely destined for cures; they were put up for daily use. We can, therefore, conclude that in all likelihood, the ruins of Mohen-jo-daro attest, from the 3rd millennium B.C., to the existence of personal and urban hygiene in India.

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Much later, hygiene and hydrotherapy come to have a great importance in the eyes of the doctors of the classical periods and they become very popular in the convents as also in private life.¹ Therein one can observe a persistence of the tastes and usages going back to the Indus civilisation. But it should not be forgotten that such tastes and such usages are born naturally in a tropical country. In any case, the well-developed ideas of hygiene, apparent from the monuments of the Indus, was neither necessarily scientific nor even medical. A system of hygiene can be medical and scientific only if it is based on the conceptions of prophylaxy and therapeutics. Otherwise, it remains only commonplace cleanliness or luxury. The hydrotherapy of Suśruta² and Caraka³ provides for treatments by svedas, the "sudations" achieved by extremely varied methods, generally much more complex than baths and shower-baths. The choice of these methods is dictated by the properties of soothing or exciting the various vital elements of the organism, which are ascribed to these methods. Drugs are incorporated in the water to be used. Nothing can indicate if, at Mohen-jo-daro, hydrotherapy already had assumed forms comparable to those described by the doctors of the classical period.

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¹ cf., J. L. Doreau, *Les bains dans l'Inde antique, monuments et textes médicaux*, Paris, 1936.

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² *Cikitsāsthāna*, XXXII, Baths (*Snānas*) are specially discussed in *Cikit.*, 56-64.

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³ *Sūtrasthāna*, XIV.

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The discoveries of the Valley of the Indus, moreover, consist of several products which could have been used as remedies. The horns of a cervidae, the *sambar* (or *sābar* in Hindi, SKT. *Śambara*, *Rusa aristotelis Jerdon*) have been found without any other remains of the animal and consequently should have been collected for their own sake. Precisely similar horns are even now utilised in popular Indian medicine. Bitumen has also been found and this substance is included in scientific pharmacopoeia of Sanskrit, under the name of *Śilājatu*. Lastly cuttle-bones, which could also have had a medical use, were contained in pottery unearthed by Majumdar at Othwan-jo-Buthi.¹ The use of similar products in therapeutics unfortunately does not have any characteristic significance. It proves nothing concerning the medical knowledge of the people of the Indus Valley civilization. We cannot therefore form any idea of the same. The material remains of this civilization would suggest that this knowledge could have been in a sufficiently advanced stage, especially so because the discovery of the Indus seals in Mesopotamia shows the relations they had with the region where the Sumerians or the Babylonians had developed an important medical tradition from an early age. From the period of Mohen-jo-daro scientific exchanges have possibly taken place between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. This is all that we can say for the time being and as a consequence, when the Vedic Aryans entered India in the 2nd millenium B.C., they may have found there already developed medical notions, which were probably related to those of the Sumerians. At this moment it is impossible for us either to confirm or deny this theory, but we will be able to show that at the time of their arrival the Indo-Aryans carried with them, if not an elaborate science of medicine, at least ideas which have entered as elements in the formation of Āyurveda.

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¹ E. Mackay, *La Civilisation de l'Indus*, French Edn., Paris, 1936, pp. 181, 185, 186.

Cites (2)