The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c8.69

Language: English

c8.69.1

Various Diseases: As our religious texts do not furnish us with systematic descriptions of the morbid states, the identification of these states is quite often uncertain and generally vague. The references made therein are, in any case, frequently sufficient to enable us to have an idea of the majority of the ailments mentioned therein. Moreover, every time we come across the name of a disease common to the Veda and to the manuals of classical medicine, we can try to apply the classical sense of this name to that passage of the Veda containing it; if this sense fits in well with the context and mainly with various contexts where that name comes in many a time, we have the right to admit that probably that sense is exact. This is the method which was used by Bergaigne for the determination of the sense of the Vedic words.¹ It is true that here it could be objected that the sense of the name of a disease is not at all comparable to a commonplace term. Scientific nosology keeps old terms for an indefinite period of time, but being in progress all the time and subject to ceaseless modifications, it frequently changes the concepts covered by these terms. Various words like “leprosy” or “asthma” have no relation whatsoever with *lepra* or *asthma* [of the Greek language] and it will be false to use them today in the translation of a Greek text without pointing out that they are meant in a sense altogether different than in the actual usage.

c8.69.2

Similarly, when a term of the Veda, is also found in the *Āyurveda*, one cannot be sure, *a priori* that it possessed the same sense in the Veda as it had in the *Ayurvedic* texts. Here it may be pointed out that the possibilities of the evolution of senses should not be exaggerated. *Lepra* [in Greek] denoted all sorts of non-classified cutaneous ailments, whereas leprosy today is an individualised disease, defined by a certain group of symptoms and it is bacteriologically characterised. Similarly *Asthma* denoted all sorts of breathlessness whereas asthma today is a dyspnoea of the expiratory type coming on by fits and characterised by the cytological formula of expectoration. But asthma and leprosy still remain the ailments whose essential manifestations are respectively respiratory and cutaneous. If, therefore, in ignorance of the exact sense which the Greeks gave to the word *lepra*, the sense of "leprosy" as known to the modern doctors, were given to it, one would be ascribing to the Greeks an exact knowledge which they did not at all possess. But if one were to be content with the supposition that among the Greeks *lepra* signified a serious cutaneous disease, that will be quite exact.

c8.69.3

One could undoubtedly find examples of more complete changes of sense than those which have come in the case of *lepra* and "leprosy" and *asthma* and "asthma", but it will be difficult to find any which be such that nothing common exists any longer between the old and the modern connotation. Under such conditions, when a disease known to classical texts is found as mentioned in the Veda, if we do not have the right to believe that the Vedic authors knew it as it is taught by the Ayurvedic practitioners, we have, at least, the right of admitting that in the Veda also it is a disease of the same type as in the *Āyurveda*. Moreover the changes of sense between the Vedic period and the classical period could not have been as considerable as they have been between the Hellenic epoch and the modern period where medicine has profoundly renovated, thanks to modern discoveries, the significance of the old terminology preserved by it. Moreover, the terms common to the Veda and to the *Āyurveda* denote chiefly the states without specificity such as cachexy or isolated symptoms such as the lancinating pain. These states and these symptoms belong more to the domain of common experience than to that of medical diagnosis; their names are therefore more of commonplace expressions than technical terms whose significance would be subject to conventional changes.