|
|
Article: Hindu medical practice in sixteenth-century western India: evidence from Portuguese sources.
- Article from:
- Portuguese Studies
- Article date:
- January 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Modern Humanities Research Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
There are many studies of ayurvedic medical practice in India in the period before the arrival of Europeans, but most of these are based on normative texts, such as those of Susruta and Caraka. (1) These tell us quite a lot about what healers in the ayurvedic system were meant to do, and the sorts of information they received from their texts, but they give almost no information on actual practice; in other words, did healers follow the texts, or was there rather a mixture of information from the texts and folk knowledge, with these two in turn being influenced by empirical observation? A. L. Basham provides a cautious summary of this: 'The instructions of the textbooks ...