English
A passage for editorial review. DHANWANTARI, THE VEDIC FATHER OF MEDICINE AND PHYSICIAN OF THE GODS HOLDING THE GOBLET OF IMMORTALITY By permission, from “ Wellcome's Medical Diary ” Frontispiece A SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE ANTIQUITY OF ~ HINDU MEDICINE BY DAVID C. MUTHU M.D., M.R.C.S, f L.R.C. P. LOND. ASSOCIATE OF KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON CHIEF PHYSICIAN, IfBNDIp HILLS SANATORIUM, WEL1 S, SOMERSET CONSULTING PHYSICIAN, LADY MARGARET’S HOSPITAL, ETC. AUTHOR OF “PULMONARY TUBERCULOSIS 1 ITS ETIOLOGY AND TREATMENT, ” ETC. SECON LONDON BAILLIERE, TINDALL fcr COX 7 & 8, Henrietta St., Covent Garden, W,C, 2 1927 t Printed in Great Britain INTRODUCTION In these pages the reader is introduced to a brief survey of the antiquity of Hindu medicine and civilisation. Euro¬ pean scholars, perhaps prejudiced by the present position of India, have been reluctant to admit the claims of the Hindus as to the antiquity of their civilisation. But the recent remarkable discoveries at Harappa and Mohenjo- Daro in the Punjab and Sind have revived a romantic interest in India’s civilisation, and have helped to confirm her high antiquity. The sands of Sind, the deep alluvial soil deposited by the , annual Hooding of the Indus through the long ages, have, like the ashes from Vesuvius that buried Pompeii, been hiding in their bosom for some five thousand years the secret of a forgotten people and their prehistoric civilisation, [i] INTRODUCTION which is now being unearthed by the efforts of Sir John Marshall and his Indian co-workers. Beneath the upper¬ most stratum of the mounds of Mohenjo- Daro their excavations have disclosed "layer beneath layer of earlier cities, each built on the ruins of its prede¬ cessor.” They have exhumed many of the ancient streets and dwelling- houses or shops " furnished with their own wells and bath-rooms, floored over with brick, and provided with covered drains connecting with larger drains in the side-streets.” They have also recovered a valuable collection of jewellery, gold and silver bangles, ear ornaments, gold netting-needles, hand¬ some necklaces, exquisitely engraved seals, earthen jars of all sizes, lovely pottery vases, cremation urns, etc. As Sir John Marshall says/ "the gold ornaments are so well finished and so highly polished that they might have come out of a Bond Street jeweller’s of today rather than from a prehistoric house of 5,000 years ago.” In fact, the [ 2 ] INTRODUCTION existence of roomy and well-built houses with bath-rooms, of an extraordinarily well-developed system of drainage, the character of jewellery and other anti¬ quities, betray " a relatively high degree of luxury and social condition of the people much in advance of what was then prevailing in Mesopotamia or Egypt.” So far Sir John Marshall and his assistants have discovered nine buried cities, and there may be three, four, or five more ancient cities buried under the portions which still remain to be excavated—which bring their period to somewhere near 7000 to 9000 b.c. Though it is premature to draw any definite conclusions at present, these archeological discoveries no doubt open up some of the forgotten chapters in the history of ancient India, and are likely to throw considerable light on the soundness of India's persistent belief that from Northern India on the plains of Septa-Sindhu (the Land of Seven Rivers) the Aryan Hindus made their [ 3 ] INTRODUCTION earliest home, which may be called "the cradle of civilisation.” One word more. The discovery of some specimens of cinnabar among the ruins suggests not. only that these ancient people knew how to extract mercury from this mineral at so remote an age, but indirectly proves the claim of the Hindus to their priority in making mercury and its preparations a speciality. [4] A SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE ANTIQUITY OF HINDU MEDICINE " Then—let me dive into the depths of Time, And bring from out the ages that have rolled A few small fragments of those wrecks sublime. Which human eye may never more behold, . . “ Shrine of the mighty ! Can it be That this is all remains of thee ?" The history of Hindu medicine, when examined from materials available at the present day and studied without prejudice or preconceived ideas, takes us back to the very cradle of Aryan civilisation. From the earliest times India captured the imagination of the world. A glory of romance and a veil of splendour cast a mystic spell upon all her achievements. Whether it be in the domain of art or science, in poetry or philosophy, in religion or mythology, in commerce or manu- [5] THE ANTIQUITY OF. facture, ancient India excelled in al¬ most every department of human activity or enterprise for many, many centuries. The European mind, which has hitherto been in the habit of tracing all its science and knowledge to Greece, - cannot understand or admit the claims of the Hindus for the antiquity of their medicine. It is true that men like Dr. Wise, 1 Neuberger, etc., have long ago pointed out that it is to the Hindus we owe the first system of medicine, and others like Wilson, Heyne, Ainslie, Royle, Dutt, Thakore Saheb, Jolley, and Hoernle, have done much to elucidate the prominent part India played in the ancient history of medi¬ cine. Though it is admitted that the records of Hindu medicine may be traced as far back as the time of Buddha (sixth century b.c.), the claims of the Hindus to be the most ancient civilised people were thought to be based on tradition, and were dismissed by the Western historians as lacking tangible proof. But in recent times the diligent [ 6 ] HINDU MEDICINE work of Indian Sanscrit scholars has done much to confirm the high anti¬ quity of Hindu civilisation. By the close study of the hymns of the Rig Veda, the oldest literary monument of Aryan thought, scholars like Tilak, 2 Das, Mookerji, Bannerjee, Sircar, Law, etc., have unearthed a most romantic story of Aryan life and civilisation stretching back to prehistoric times, and even to geological epochs. From their research of Vedic literature they have traced the gradual development of the human mind step by step, and have constructed a history of the ancient Aryan people, their civilisation, culture, and medicine, just as truly and unmistakably as ancient Babylon and Assyrian history have been demon¬ strated from the writings on stones and clay bricks, and from their ruins and monuments. [7] B THE ANTIQUITY OF The Antiquity of Indo-Aryan Civilisation. As the medical history of the Indo- Aryans forms an inseparable part of the history of their civilisation, the proof of the antiquity of their medicine can be found in the antiquity of their civilisation. India occupies a fore¬ most place in the ancient history of the world. As Count Bjornstjema 3 says, “no nation on earth can vie with the Hindus in the antiquity of their civilisation and their religion. The Bacterian' document/ found in Kash¬ mir and brought to Europe by Sir William Jones, gives us an entire register of Hindu kings, and proves that India enjoyed splendid civilisation 6000 b.c. This is further proved by the history gathered from the recent rendering of the Vedic hymns, which take one back to immemorial antiquity. These hymns have shown that Vedic Aryans migrated and planted colonies in different parts of the world which [S] HINDU MEDICINE became centres of civilisation in Persia, China, Egypt, Phoenicia, Babylonia, 6 and still later in Greece and Rome,® and later still in countries in the Far East, including Pegu, Siam, Cambodia, Java, Sumatra, Borneo, and Islands of the Malay Archipelago. 7 The Druids in' ancient Britain were considered to be Buddhist Brahmans, 8 and the Scan¬ dinavians to be the descendants of the Hindu Kshatriyas. 0 The Indians were the inventors of numerical figures and the decimal system. “ To them,” as Professor Monier Williams 10 says, ‘ ‘ is due the invention of Algebra, Geometry, and their application to Astronomy.” * As religion profoundly influenced the daily life and thought of the Hindus, they cultivated those sciences that most helped them in their worship. Hence their sciences of Astronomy, Geometry, and practical Anatomy are very old. Even European scholars like Cassini, Bailly, Gentil, and Play¬ fair maintain that there are Hindu observations extant which must have [ 9 ] THE ANTIQUITY OF been more than 3000 years b.c., and which evinced even then a high degree of astronomical science. Of all the ancient nations, the Hindus alone had wellnigh accurately determined the rate of motion of the precession of the Equinoxes. The great antiquity of astronomy is the best proof of its originality. In the twelfth cen¬ tury a.d., Bhaskara expounded the-*, law- of gravity and the principle of Differential Calculus, thus anticipating Newton by many centuries. The geo¬ metrical theorem of the forty-seventh proposition. Book I, which tradition ascribes to Pythagoras, was solved by the Hindus at least two centuries earlier. They invented fables and fairy-tales which have been translated into almost every modern language and have be¬ come the nursery stories among the children of the whole world. The art of writing has been known since - the Vedic times 11 —at least 4000 b.c. Bjomstjema says that the Hindus possessed written books of religion [10] HINDU MEDICINE before 2800 b.c., or 800 years before Abraham. They invented a language of unrivalled richness, harmony, and inflection"— Sanscrit — which is the mother of all European languages. Cotton paper was used in India before the Christian Era.