A History of Hindu Chemistry from the Earliest Times to the Middle of the Sixteenth Century A.D. v1.c9.s1.84

v1.c9.s1.84

Haas is anxious to prove that the Hindus borrowed their notions of humoral pathology from the Greeks, and that the *origines* of Indian Medicine are to be looked for in the writings of Galen and Hippocrates; indeed he goes so far as to suggest that the very name of Susruta is derived from the Arabic word Sukrat (=Sokrates), which is often confounded with Bukrat, the Arabic corruption of the Greek Hippocrates.¹ There is certainly a strange similarity between the chapter on "Initiation" in the Charaka and the "Eides" of Æsculapius as pointed out by Roth,² and there is also much in common between the doctrine of humoral pathology of the Greeks and the Hindus respectively—suggesting that borrowing may have taken place on one side or the other. But the Hindus would seem to have priority of time in their favour.