The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c8.110

c8.110

The jāyānya is again quite near to the better defined lesions called, the apacits, "adenopathies". The 1st and 2nd stanzas of the hymn VII, 76 of Atharvaveda (whose 3rd to 5th stanzas constitute a conjuration against the jāyānya) are employed against the apacits. As has been quite well shown by Bloomfield,³ apacit represents the disease known in classical medicine as apaci. Suśruta describes it quite clearly: "The kapha transforms the fat accumulated in the maxilliary, axilliary, claviculary (*fossa supraclavicularis*) and brachial (elbow) joints, in the neck and in the throat as a hard nodule, round or long, fluctuating and causing little pain. This nodule, increasing in size because of other nodules of the size of the myrobalan-stone, resembling the eggs of the fish and others of the same (aspect) and being of the same colour (as the chief nodule) is called, because of the pre-eminence of the pile: *apaci*.¹ It is, therefore, clearly a case of adenopathies, presenting themselves first in the form of isolated nodules (*granthi*), then becoming confluents (*apaci*) and which, of course, can be suppurating: "The ones, pruriginous, causing little pain, once crushed, disappear and others persist. This disease, coming certainly from the fat and the *kapha*, is difficult to vanquish; it continues for a number of years".²