The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c7.s2.57

c7.s2.57

More important is the drug Nasu for whom Hertel and Reinhold Müller have desired to find a Vedic counterpart and in whom they have desired to see the witness of the Indo-Iranian concept of the igneous nature of disease.³ The hymn X. 163 of the Rg-veda consists of a charm for chasing the yákṣma from all the parts of from body which are successively named. In the Videvdāt (VIII. 35-72), the purification of corpses by means of water is discussed and the limbs from which water chases away, turn by turn, the drug Nasu, are enumerated. There is perforce a resemblance between the two enumerations without their having a common Indo-Iranian origin. However Hertel and Müller had thought that the rapprochement of the two texts revealed the existence of a worry among the Indo-Iranians, which we will call a prophylactic one, and he had proposed that the Avestan drug was regarded as a demoniacal fire. Earlier, he had suggested that the yákṣma drew its name “from the high temperature of those who are caught by it”,⁴ but he had not noticed that there is no proof to show that the yákṣma was necessarily feverish. His conviction was essentially based on the equivalence which he had proposed yákṣati = yájati¹ and on the sense of “changing into fire” which he claimed as the original sense for yaj=to sacrifice.² From all this, it resulted that the disease had been a malignant fire for the Indo-Iranians.