The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c7.s2.65

c7.s2.65

It is, however, possible to establish a rapprochement between the yákṣma and the drugs, not as going back to the Indo-Iranian concept of an igneous physical impurity, but because of the relations existing between the physical evil or the material impurity on the one hand and the sin on the other. The Avestan *drug*s are chiefly the demons of sin and impurities. The *drug*, *par excellence*, is covered and fertilised by the sinners, voluntary or involuntary ones: the one who refuses to give a piece of cloth to the faithful indigent, one who urinates near one's foot, one who has a nocturnal pollution and one who, at the age of fifteen, has intercourse with a prostitute (*Vid.*, XVII, 34-5). This clearly shows that physical impurities and moral defects can be assimilated. The *drug* represents therefore all the evil elements attached to human beings in their bodies and in their spiritual personalities. In so far as it is attached to the bodies, it can give rise to diseases (*Vid.*, IX, 48). It had been probably observed that the contact of corpses was not only repugnant but also dangerous and that the disease which had led to death stays attached to the body, because it is said that various afflictions are found in those depots where corpses are exposed, in the *dakhmas* (*Vid.*, VII, 58). The dog, chiefly certain dogs having special characteristics, were considered as being capable of putting the *drug* Nasu on the run (VIII, 16-18) and it is not, undoubtedly, because the dog is a creature of Ahura Mazda (*Vid.*, XIII, 39), highly valued for his utility in keeping watch over the herds and men. The dog keeps his tongue and his teeth surprisingly clean even when he nourishes himself on carrion; he could, therefore, appear to possess a virtue which destroyed putrefaction. Similarly it is probable that other beings who nourish themselves on corpses in stages of decay—birds, wolves, flies—were thought to have a quality of purification because it was agreed that they did not pass on the impurity with which they were in contact (*Vid.*, V, 3-7).¹ It is clear that these ideas have hardly anything to do with medicine; they are, in the first place, the result of instinctive repulsions and then that of a unitary concept of evil. Lastly they are the observations leading us to the belief that the dead spread a morbific power to which is opposed an anti-morbid magical virtue found among beings who can expose themselves to contagion with impunity.