The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c8.20

c8.20

*The Medical Rôle of Divinities*:—Many of the Vedic divinities play, at least, occasionally, a medical rôle, in the sense that they dispense remedies or on the contrary, provoke diseases. This, of course, is not the place to record all that is available on the subject in the Saṃhitās as the divinities do not have much of an importance in classical medicine, whose formation we are studying.² Only it is necessary to remind ourselves of the chief traits of the divine and the demoniacal medicine of the Veda in order to measure all that Āyurveda has rejected therefrom and the little that it has kept in an extremely restricted field