Do Turbans Provide Protection Against Cranial Trauma in Two-Wheeler Accidents? A Review of the Indian Medical Literature

While early canonical Jain literature may well justify the assessment that some scholars have made about the Jains’ stoic resistance to medical aid, later post-canonical Śvetāmbara Jain texts reveal in fact a much more complex relationship to practices of healing. They make frequent references to medical practice and the alleviation of sickness, describing various medical procedures and instruments and devoting long sections to the interaction between doctors and monastics as issues that a monastic community would have to negotiate as a matter of course. The amount of medical knowledge — indeed fascination with healing human ailments — evident in these later texts invites us to pause before concluding that pre-modern Jain monastic traditions were disinterested in alleviating physical distress. It seems that, on the contrary, the question of when and how to treat the sick within the community emerged as a central concern that preoccupied the monastic authorities and commentators and left its mark on the texts they compiled. Moreover, from the early medieval period onwards, Jains enter the history of Indian medical literature as authors and compilers of actual medical treatises. In what follows, I try to trace this historical shift in Śvetāmbara Jain attitudes to medicine and healing, from the early canonical texts to post-canonical commentaries on the mendicants’ rules. Specifically, I focus on the treatment of medicine in three monastic commentaries composed around the sixth and seventh centuries CE.

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G. JAN MEULENBELD: A History of Indian Medical Literature. (Groningen Oriental Studies Volume XV/I–III.) Groningen: Egbert Forsten (Ia and Ib) 1999; (IIa and IIb) 2000; (III) 2002. Ia: 1 frontispiece, xvii, 699 pp.; Ib: 1 frontispiece, vi, 774 pp.; IIa: 1 frontispiece, viii, 839 pp. (in addition: reprint of 19 pages defective in Ia); IIb: 1 frontispiece, viii, 1018 pp.; III (Indexes): 1 frontispiece, ii, 549 pp. €600.

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies ◽

10.1017/s0041977x0430025x ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 67 (3) ◽

pp. 404-407 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

DOMINIK WUJASTYK

Keyword(s):

Medical Literature ◽

Indian Medical ◽

History Of ◽

Oriental Studies

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Doṣas by the Numbers

History of Science in South Asia ◽

10.18732/hssa68 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 9 ◽

Author(s):

Kenneth Zysk

Keyword(s):

Medical Literature ◽

Early Time ◽

Indian Medical ◽

Hippocratic Corpus ◽

Early Buddhism ◽

Literary Sources

This paper explores the origins of the Indian medical nosology involving the three doṣas from the perspective of its formulation into three or four distinct types. The essay compares similarities in passages from three different literary sources: Pāļi texts of early Buddhism, early Sanskrit medical literature, and Greek texts from the Hippocratic Corpus and the Anonymus Londiniensis. The study reveals that the tridoṣa-theory, common to āyurvedic literature from an early time was based on the adoption and then adaption of ideas nourished by an intellectual exchange with the Greek-speaking world.

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