Hindu Medicine c5.s3.28

c5.s3.28

them. Nevertheless he found the work hard. A *publicum* which he read in the summer of 1937 had made him fully aware of the difficulty of the subject. In connection with our first discussion of the matter, he wrote that it was necessary to unearth all the details; otherwise the picture would remain incorrect. The two great encyclopedias, Caraka and Suśruta, had to be translated chapter by chapter. “An evaluation is a difficult though stimulating problem. The situation seems similar to that of occidental medicine which was carried on in the late ancient fashion until, in the ‘Biedermeier,’ modern medicine came into existence, based on chemistry and the natural sciences. Yet it would be . . . wrong to apply modern standards. . . . Age-old experience and intuition demand their rights even though one should refrain from romantic idealization. . . . Only by conquering the material step by step . . . can one hope to grasp the presuppositions which are explicitly and implicitly indicated and which serve to explain the entire style of thought and its inherent interrelations.” ¹⁴