The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c8.159

c8.159

Takman, you derive pleasure in living among the Bāhlikas”.¹ It is, therefore, not only because one desires to banish it to stranger countries, that it is sent there, but also because it is a disease of theirs and it cannot be excluded, á priori that its name current in the country, where it was endemic, has been used. In any case, the word takmán has not survived in classical medicine², where, however, the study of classical medicine has had a big development. Only the names of its intermittent forms, as we have seen, have been preserved. We may also point out in this regard that it will be extremely misleading to date the medical notions according to the dates of the texts of the classical tradition in which they are arrested. The intermittent fevers are studied in the Suśruta-saṃhitā only in the Uttaratantra, suspected to have been appended at a later date and yet their notion was possessed from the time of the Atharvaveda. The silence of the older part of the Suśruta is explained by a simple lacuna in the editing of this text.