History of Medicine in India (from Antiquity to 1000 A.D.) (review)

P. V. Sharma has assembled essays by twenty authors for a reference book on Ayurveda, the Hindu-Buddhist tradition of humoral medicine. As a gesture toward the volume's comprehensive title, additional essays briefly consider the period before Ayurvedic texts were written, exchanges with Islam, Tibetan medicine, and the Tamil-language tradition of Siddha medicine. Except for the Dutch scholar Jan Meulenbeld, almost all of the authors are, like the editor, physicians, teachers, or administrators in Ayurvedic colleges or governmental agencies.

This volume will be most useful for scholars new to the subject as a document setting forth the way in which professional representatives of Ayurveda view their science. Banaras Hindu University (BHU) is the primary center for Ayurvedic learning in India today. When it was founded in the 1920s, the medical school set out to improve Ayurvedic practice by integrating humoral science with modern knowledge. In 1960, responding to student demands, the integrated curriculum was terminated and replaced by a regular M.B.B.S. program. The Ayurvedic faculty was retained, however, along with the pharmacy, outpatient clinics, and hospital beds for Ayurvedic therapies. A Post-Graduate Institute of Indian Medicine was soon created with these resources. P. V. Sharma lived through this transformation, becoming professor and head of the Department of Dravyaguna (pharmacology), and before retiring he served as director of the Institute. He and his BHU colleagues wrote twenty of the thirty-six essays in the book, and coauthored two others.

The book is composed of three sections devoted to pre-Vedic, Vedic, and post-Vedic periods. Since almost nothing is known about medical care in the first period, the single essay in this section is six pages long. Even so, it is set apart by the editor because, as another contributor puts it:

History of medicine in India begins from prehistoric times. In fact, the knowledge of medicine (̄Ayurveda) is eternal and it is not possible to trace its beginning. . . . The tradition of ̄Ayurveda is a divine one not only in the sense that it was revealed by the creator himself and preserved by Indra, the Lord of gods, but also because it was strengthened and further developed by the divine intellect and vision of the seers.

(pp. 309, 314)

Section 2 has three short essays on the Vedic period. Here, too, almost nothing is known about medical practice, and these essays are largely composed of lists. There are lists of maladies and of plants mentioned in the Vedic hymns, and lists of prayers to and miracles performed by the Asvins, two physician-gods.

More than 80 percent of the volume is devoted to the third period, in which the canonical medical texts were written. For these authors Ayurvedic concepts express eternal truths about life processes that modern science either neglects or rediscovers, and “medicine in ancient India was far ahead to [sic] that in other countries” (p. x). Yet the urban Indian middle classes variously consider Ayurveda to be an “alternative holistic medicine,” as in Europe or North America, along with homeopathy and acupuncture. They may identify it with backward practices of rural folk and uneducated people, or associate it with hair tonics, pills to enhance sexual potency, liver syrup, and other widely advertised products of the indigenous pharmaceutical industry. Finally, of course, middle-class people recognize professional Ayurvedic practitioners, like the authors of this book, and frequently have a favorite one to consult—but when these physicians appear in modern novels and films, they are usually comic figures. Since the cultural authority of Ayurveda suffers in comparison to allopathic medicine, the defensive response in this volume is to assert its validity by anachronistic references to research methods in ancient universities and biomedical translations of humoral concepts. The tone is established in the foreword by T. N. Tandon, president of the Indian National Science Academy:

It is surprising how the ancient scholars collected such a huge amount...