Indian Medicine (Medicin), translated by C. G. Kashikar c15.16

c15.16

According to Madhava there are two kinds of poison : sthāvara from stable things i. e. plants and animals, and jaṅgama from animals. The latter causes sleepiness, weakness, atony, heat, indigestion, goose-skin, tumour, diarrhoea; the former causes fever, hiccup, sensitiveness of teeth, throat-aching, foam from the mouth, nausea, difficult breathing and faint. From root-poison especially there is pain in the limbs, delirium and numbness; from leaf-poison there is yawning, shivering and difficult breathing; by fruit poison there is swelling of testicles, heat and loss of appetite; by flower poison there is vomiting, flatulence and difficult breathing; from bark juice or resin of poisonous trees there is bad smell from the mouth, roughness of the skin and headache; from chyle there is foam from the mouth, diarrhoea and heaviness in the limbs; from mineral poison there is pain in the chest, faint and heat in the palate. These poisons mostly cause death in course of time. If anybody is hit with a poisonous arrow, the wound suppurates immediately and successively becomes black, moist and very bad smelling, the flesh shrinks up, besides there is thirst, faint, fever and heat. The effects of serpent-bite are varied. Quickly fatal is the bite of the cobra or hooded serpent (darvikara). In the heat and cachetic conditions serpent-bites are particularly dangerous. Bad symptoms are : after the bite no blood comes out, no stripes are caused by strokes, bathing with cold water causes no goose-skin, a black and red tumour appears on the bitten place, there is lockjaw, blood flows from the mouth and the anus, there is loss of speech etc. Duṣīviṣa, i. e. the poison that is old, dried out by fire, Sun or wind or decomposed by antidote or does not possess normal strength, acts mildly inasmuch as it never brings death, but has an after-effect for years together and brings about diarrhoea, bad smell and bad taste in the mouth and other troubles, difficult breathing, thirst, fever etc., in other cases madness or constipation or impotency or tongue-paralysis or leprosy and other diseases. Bites of 16 poisonous spiders are described in detail; they cause different kinds of boils with fever, heat, diarrhoea and other symptoms; so also the bites of rats and mice, scorpions, gad-flies, poisonous frogs, fish and leeches, house-lizards, hundred-footed and other insects and the poison in the claws and teeth of the tiger, apes and other animals (MN 429-42). Su, AS and AHr deal with poison in more details. Yet, of the mineral poisons Suśruta mentions only phenāśmabhasman—a burnt stone, that is burnt orpiment and Haritāla. AS besides mentions rakta (Cinnabar or copper?). Among the numerous vegetable poisons mentioned in Su, AS and AHr, strychnine, vomiting nut (kupilu), opium (ahiphena) and Datura (dhūstūra, unmatta)* which are very much in vogue in India* are not met with. On the other hand, Su, AS and AHr also describe the madness of jackals, dogs, hyenas, bears, panthers, tigers and wolves and the disease jalatrāsa—hydrophobia arising from their bite (Su 5; AS 6.40-8; AHr 6.35-38; cf. Car 6.23; Bhāv 2.4; Vang 922 ff.).