The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c8.69.3

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.