Hindu Medicine c7.273

c7.273

The description of the patient who provides real support to the art of medicine shows that the Hindu physician is not any too confident of his skill. In general the doctor should avoid treating diseases from which a patient has been suffering for more than a year. In diagnosing he should ascertain whether the patient has “strength of long life” (āyus). Caraka warns (I, 10): “a physician who takes up the treatment of a disease that is incurable incurs loss of wealth, loss of knowledge, loss of prestige, censure of the world, and incapacity for practice.” Suśruta, in the “lesson on the diagnosis of wounds, whether they are curable or forebode destruction” (I, 28), cautions the physician against being ready to accept a case which seems hopeless: “a practitioner incurs public disgrace by trying to cure a patient whose life-strength (or life-time: āyus) is gone.”