LESLIE HAMILTON SHIRLAW 3
of dissection and frowned upon the majority of surgical operations, announcing
them ' improper, indecent and not allowable '. The Buddhists did, however,
encourage the practice of medicine, and built many hospitals for man and beast,
and established several medical schools, notably that of Taxila.
On the ruins of Buddhism in India, the Brahmans climbed to omnipotence,
(circa 4th century A.D.). To enhance their own power, they forbade the shed
ding of blood and the touching of corpses, and introduced the treatment of
disease by mantras and incantations, known only to themselves. These
Brahmans held the doctrine that all action is a positive evil and thus the
study of human or animal medicine could offer them no attraction.
Having pronounced the medical writings of their predecessors sacrosanct
and any one tampering with them guilty of Brahmanicide, they sank back
into their meditations upon the infinite. Consequently such surgery as was
practised fell into the hands of the lower castes. As Elphinstone says ' Physi
cians followed the practice of their instructors without inquiry and surgery
was so far neglected that bleeding was left to the barber, bone setting to the
herdsman and every one was ready to administer a blister ', while the term
' go-vaidya ' (cow doctor) became one of reproach levelled at any person in
competent at his job. ' The intellectual portion of the community being
withdrawn from cooperation in the art, the how and why of phenomena....
were lost sight of . . . . Among a people ridden by caste and hidebound by the
authorities . . . . and having their intellect thus cramped and paralysed, no
Boyle could arise'. [Ray].
As for the early medical writings, they became the prey of innumerable
commentators, whose work may be compared with that of the mediæval scho
lastics of Europe, pedants whose total divorce from practice made their notes
and additions mere ignorant and useless encumbrances. In human medicine,
Suśrutha and Charaka, in veterinary medicine, Sálihotra and Palakapya held
an undisputed sway, comparable to that held for two thousand years in Europe
by Galen. All later so-called authorities were really mere copyists. As
Ibn Abu Usaibiâh said in his ' Fountains of Information ' thirteenth century
A. D.), ' the Indians at present occupy themselves with the works of these men
(the ancient Hindu physicians) and imitate them, handing them down from
one to another '. This naturally led to a progressive e'aboration of form and
deterioration of content throughout the centuries.
Unfortunately the climate and insect life of India and the mater als of
which these first ancient works were composed rendered them very liable to
destruction. Weber states that few original Indian manuscripts prior to 1500
A.D. are now extant. Copying was therefore an unavoidable necessity, and
it is the ignorance and carelessness with which this was done ' so that an
author would scarce have recognized his own work ', that caused Alberuni in
the 11th century A.D. to call Ayurvedic science a mixture of ' pearls and dung ',
and which has led many people to despise altogether the medicine of the East.
Thus long before the Mohammedan invasion and the introduction of a
new (Yunani) system of medicine, the intellectual stranglehold of Brahmanism
had crushed the spirit of scientific enquiry and the carelessness of later trans-
lators and clerks had reduced the oldest complete system of medicine known
to history to a jumble of empirical nonsense. Nevertheless such scraps of the