The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c8.s1.22

c8.s1.22

We cannot pursue the examination of innumerable magical practices, which constitute Vedic therapeutics as they have no rôle in the formation of the scientific medicine of the classical epoch. Of course, it is admitted that magic prepares the appearance of science and furnishes it within its first elements. But it seems to be an illusion. Certainly medical magic starts to treat all sorts of ailments, thus providing the magician with an occasion to observe them. Besides, the curative charms comprise the use of a large number of plants and of products which, leaving aside their supposed magical virtue, can have a real physiological action. From there it is readily concluded that the magician ends up by acquiring, more or less in spite of himself, exact notions of pathology and of therapeutics. But this is too vulgar a manner of conceiving the formation of scientific notions. A notion can be called scientific only if it comprises a rational element, the rudiments of the natural explanation of a phenomenon or of the justification of an observed property. When the healer observes a disease, if he contents himself with only observing the symptoms of the disease, he makes neither science nor magic; he does not get out of pure empiricism. If he tries to explain the observed disease, two things can happen. Either he joins it immediately to a system of phenomena with which the disorder shows some analogy, allowing its participation in this system of phenomena without trying to find out any reason thereof; in that case he poses a magical relationship. Or, by means of reasoning he relates it to a group of understood facts. It is only then that he establishes or sketches out a scientific explanation. It is possible that the same man, who has, at first, posed a magical relation, later on conceives a scientific explanation, but the latter does not result from the former. On the contrary, the latter could only have been delayed by the former. The right path does not lie in the prolongation of the wrong route. A person, who after losing his way, finds it, does not owe his success to his former mistake; he owes it to his research. Similarly, if the healer finds a truly medical explanation of pathological facts, it is not because he has at first tried a magical speculation, he has continued the research from which the former would have led him away.