The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c7.s1.5

c7.s1.5

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.