The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c8.163

c8.163

*Alajī*, mentioned in a list of exorcised diseases¹ is well known to Suśruta under the orthography of *alajī*. It is not a characteristic disease, but a type of morbid element, appearing in various diseases. It is one of the ten vesicular ailments (*piḍaka*) appearing as a complication in patients suffering from the "alteration of urines" (*prameha*), "*alajī* is red, white, pustulous, painful".² It can arise in the penis and can be, in that case, due to *Śuka*, concerning whose causal nature the commentators have different hypotheses³; it has, in any case, the same characteristics when it complicates the "alteration of urines". Lastly, *alajī* is also the name of the vesicles of sclero-corneal limb: "It should be known that *parvaṇī* is a type of swelling coming from blood, round, copper-coloured, short, accompanied by heat and lancinating pain, caused by a union of the black and the white (of the eye); there can be at this very (localisation) the *alajī* defined by the symptoms described above (i.e., according to the commentator Dalhaṇa, defined by the same symptoms as the *parvaṇī* from which it differs only by additional thickness).¹ The most probable old sense is, therefore, "vesicle", in any case the name is that of a morbid form and not that of a disease.