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Indian Medicine (Medicin), translated by C. G. Kashikar c2: Foreword

Indian Medicine (Medicin), translated by C. G. Kashikar c2

Language
English

Foreword

c2.1

The works on the general history of Medicine do not give sufficient space to the Indian medicine. The latter is, however, important under two heads: The conceptions of the physicians of ancient India, like those of the astronomers and specialists in different sciences, have played a great role in the general culture of India and have entered in many philosophical doctrines as the basic elements. The theory of the Pranas and the psycho-physiological ideas of the Ayurveda have spread everywhere: the conceptions of logic in the Caraka Samhita are among the most ancient of the Nyayadarsana. Besides, the Indian Medicine has played in Asia the same role as the Greek Medicine in the west, for it has spread in Indo-China, Indonesia, Tibet, Central Asia and as far as Japan exactly as the Greek Medicine has done in Europe and the Arab countries. It is, therefore, one of the great domains of study for the history of thought in India as well as in the world. The importance of the Indian Medicine had already been realised by the Greeks of Alexander. Several of its texts have been translated into Arabic since the first cultural contacts of the Muslims with India. In the middle of the sixteenth century its most precious drugs have been studied by the Portuguese Garcia-da-orta. In the seventeenth century its interest had been recognised in Java by the Dutch Bontius. But it is chiefly at the end of the nineteenth century that it had been studied by H. H. Wilson from the Sanskrit documents and by Csoma-da-Koros from the Tibetan version of the large-sized treatise the Sanskrit text of which has unfortunately been lost. Now it is more than a century that the first translation of Susruta was published in Latin by Hessler. The knowledge of numerous authors and Ayurvedic works has been placed at the disposal of the medical public in France by the numerous articles of Lietard in the encyclopaedic Dictionary of Medical Sciences numbering a hundred volumes of the state of Medicine and its history, in the second half of the nineteenth century (1864-1889). Thus, the study of the Indian Medicine came out of the province of the specialists in order to take its place in the classical science which, even though secured, ought to be still greater.

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Two works which describe in great details the ideas contained in the principal Sanskrit treatises, chiefly those that relate to the pathology and nomenclature of the diseases have been consecrated to it; they are:— (1) *commentary on the Hindu System of Medicine* by Th. A. Wise (Calcutta, 1845) and (2) *Medicine* (in German) by J. Jolly, in the Encyclopaedia of Indo-Aryan Research of Buhler and Kielhorn. The first has to its credit two editions (1860 and 1900). The second deserves to-day, at the fiftieth anniversary of its publication (1901), an English translation which would secure for it a greater utilisation.

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Since that time some important and new sources in the Tibetan versions have been discovered and studied notably by P. Cordier. The Tamil sources, unjustly neglected for a very long time, have been utilised by Dr. Paramananda Mariadassou. A portion of the Mongol version of the same Tibetan translation of a Sanskrit treatise which had been formerly used by Csoma has been published with a Russian translation by Pozdneev. The place of the doctrines of the Medical schools in Indian philosophy has been noted by Dr. S. N. Dasgupta. Thanks to the progress in historical studies, it is possible hereafter to consider with greater precision than heretofore, the problems of the correspondences of the Indian Medicine with those of Greece, Iran, Islam and China. Besides, the therapeutics has been studied and the pharmacological value of the old Ayurvedic drugs has been fixed. But it will be profitable to consider the results already obtained half a century ago when Jolly brought them together.

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College de France, Paris Ve

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J. FILLIOZAT

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