Hindu Medicine c5.s3.38

c5.s3.38

What is the relation between Hindu medicine and Greek medicine? A priori an influence of the one on the other even in early times seems not impossible. Quite apart from the dependence on Indian thought attributed by later tradition to men like Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Plato, it is a fact that Greek physicians in the sixth century B. C. lived at the court of the Persian kings to whose empire India belonged. Indian troops were among those whom Xerxes led against Greece in 480 B. C.¹⁸ These facts imply that there must have been an interchange between the two civilizations. But the uncertainty of the chronology of Hindu medical writings makes it difficult to determine the exact nature of any mutual influence. Is it permissible to assume that the old codifications of medical magic of the Aryan immigrants and their