Medical Knowledge in Ancient India: From Myths, to Surgery and Ayurveda

Abstract

Medicine is a natural art born out of the instinct of self-preservation. As in every other land, medical knowledge in India must have grown out of the sheer necessity of overcoming injury, sickness and pain. This overpowering compulsion also made man give up the indiscriminate use of raw vegetation and meat from all sources in favor of selective cultivation, husbandry, processing, mixing and cooking. The prehistoric art of selecting substances which could be assimilated by the human system with benefit and their cooking and compounding to give the most of nourishment and health forms integral parts of the indigenous medical science of India, known as the Ayurveda. The term ayus means duration or span of life; veda means unimpeachable knowledge. Hence the Ayurveda is concerned mainly with prolongation of healthy life and prevention of disease and senility and only secondarily with curing of disease. The common translation of Ayurveda is science of life. Surgery is another survival skill which is as old as hunting. Although there may have been several different systems of medicine in ancient India, the texts and traditions of only one of these Ayurveda (literally, knowledge for longevity) has come down to us. The Charaka and Sushruta Samhitas are its earliest surviving texts. There is little evidence to substantiate the claim made by the Ayurveda tradition that its roots lie in the Veda. Although Vedic texts do contain ideas related to healing and medicine, these do not match those of Ayurveda. Neither is there any indication that Ayurveda owed anything to Greek medicine; not a single Greek loan word can be identified in its terminology. Debiprasad Chattopadhyay argues that the medical literature represents part of a secular, i.e. non-religious empirical tradition that, at some point of time, came to be Brahmanized. On the other hand, Kenneth G. Zysk holds that the roots of Ayurveda lie in the milieu of the Buddhist monasteries of early historical India, and that medical knowledge and the practice of monks gradually spread beyond the confines of the monasteries. It is interesting to note the interweaving of philosophical ideas, for instance, those of Samkhya, Yoga and Vaisheshika, in the medical texts.