Hindu Medicine c8.154

c8.154

The very word for “lungs” (kloman), in the medical encyclopedias, is conspicuous for its rare occurrence, one could almost say for its absence, in spite of the fact that the texts deal at length with consumption and similar diseases. Pulmonary consumption is significantly termed “Śoṣa,” “drying up.” In destroying the lungs it is believed to assail the principal seat of the watery matter in the organism, drying up the humor phlegm in the course of its progress; for phlegm, residing in the chest, “holds together the trunk between the shoulders.”