The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c8.66

c8.66

These ideas have survived in classical medicine but not in the focal points of its doctrines. They have been preserved mainly in the common beliefs and have been introduced in the medical texts by the pressure of the latter without being integrated in their systems of more scientific explanations. The seizing demons, the grahas, the heirs of the grāhi attack specially children, just as the rakṣas attack the embryos, and, among other demons, certain śakunis are said to provoke diseases, studied by classical medicine in special chapters, separately and in addition to ordinary diseases about which it has to learn.² The she-demon related to the grahas and who are given the auspicious name of “mothers”, the mātṛkās, play, in the same texts of the classical medicine, a rôle of the first order. They are also attached though this time indirectly to Vedic souvenirs because they form a part of the pan-demonium grouped around Śiva who, undoubtedly of the extra-Vedic origin, already appears in the hymns in the forms, already seen by us, of Rudra.³ In any case, whereas classical medicine had to embark upon the path of the detailed explanation of morbid causes, in the eopch of the Vedic texts, it was thought to be enough if a relationship could be established between the pathological phenomena and all that appeared to be contrary to the Norm of the world if its origin could be ascribed to shortcoming and to fault, so that they could be fitted back in a general and familiar determinism.