The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c8.107

c8.107

Erysipelas would be quite in place beside it.¹ However, the same word viśalyaka is found in other enumerations where neighbouring terms denote diseases of another type and chiefly, viśalpaka is a lectio facilior, whose authenticity is not certain. Bloomfield has rendered viśalyaka as "neuralgia" and this translation would be creditable if the neighbouring word aṅgabheda did certainly stand for a harrowing pain, all the more because AV., IX, 8, 2, places "ear-ache", karṇaśūla, immediately before viśalyaka. But the analysis of the word itself remains embarrassing. One could suppose that this is a case of an adjectival formation in ya on visala or bisala, "shoot, bud", of the same type as dantya from danta with the extra addition of the suffix ka (quite frequent in the names of diseases). The word bisa exists in the vocabulary of classical medicine in bisavartma (Suśr., Utt., III, 26), "the eyelid in the form of a lotus-stalk" which is defined as below: "Is considered like the eyelid in the form of lotus-stalk, the eyelid which is swollen and has many small holes like the lotus-stalk inside water".² This aspect can be realised by glandular abcesses or by multiple styes causing oedema and opening out by as many small orifices. Viśalyaka could, therefore, even designate a disease "with buds" which would belong to the same category as the jāyānya.