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The Thin End of the Wedge Medical Relativities as a Paradigm of Early Modern Indian–European Relations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

M. N. Pearson
M. N. Pearson
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales
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Extract

The Rise of the West, the creation of the Third World, the beginnings of disparity between Asia and Europe, or whatever other phrase is used, is obviously the great event of world history; hence the attempts to explain and date it, going back to the time when the Rise was actually beginning in the later eighteenth century. The literature is vast, complex and mostly of high quality. Some of it is concerned with causation—how did ‘the West’ get ahead, why did ‘Asia’ fall back or perhaps just stay the same? Others are interested in trying to date the beginnings of inequality—when can we see the beginnings of dominance, where did this occur and in which sectors of human life was this first to be seen? The first matter is, of course, the more important for an historian. It has been argued that, in the most general way, the fundamental cause of the beginnings of inequality is the series of changes in western Europe, and at first in England, known collectively as the Industrial Revolution. I will use this term as a shorthand for these collective changes, which Marshall Hodgson called the ‘Great Western Transmutation.’ Put most crudely, western Europe advanced and changed in a paradigmatic way, while Asia did not. At the most, Asia kept doing what it had been doing for centuries; Europe changed basically.

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Modern Asian Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , February 1995 , pp. 141 - 170
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 In what follows, I will be writing about India most of the time, rather than all of Asia, though I have drawn some examples from Persia. I have discussed in some detail elsewhere these broad changes, and the reader is referred to these for a fuller analysis and quite large bibliography. See Pearson, M. N., Before Colonialism: Theories on Asian-European Relations, 1500–1730 (Delhi, 1988),Google Scholar and ‘Merchants and States’,Tracy, James D. (ed.), The Political Economy of Merchant Empires (New York, CUP, 1991) PP. 41–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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20 Olearius, p. 338.Google Scholar

21 see The Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd edn, s.v. djarrah [surgery].

22 Generally on all this, see Basham, A. L., The Wonder that was India (London, 1963), pp. 500–2,Google Scholar for an excellent summary, and also Basham, A. L. (ed.), A Cultural History of India (Oxford, 1975) pp. 48, 147–50, 438.Google Scholar See also a good survey in Ackerknecht, Edwin H., A Short History of Medicine (Baltimore, 1982), pp. 35–43.Google Scholar For Indian Muslim medicine, see Ikram, S. M., Muslim Rule in India and Pakistan (Lahore, 1966), 2nd edn, pp. 181–3.Google Scholar For Ibn Sina's influence on Indian medicine, see Hameed, Hakim Abdul and Bari, Hakim Abdul, ‘Impact of Ibn Sina's Medical Works in India’, Studies in History of Medicine, VIII (1984), pp. 1–12.Google Scholar

23 Quoted in Gaitonde, p. 101.Google Scholar

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27 See a useful discussion in Arnold, David, ‘Smallpox and Colonial Medicine in Nineteenth-century India’, in Arnold, (ed.), Imperial Health and Indigenous Societies pp. 46–7.Google Scholar

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29 Jahangir, I, 442, II, 65, 66–7.Google Scholar

30 The following discussion is merely a cursory survey of European descriptions of early modern Indian medicine. In particular, the Portuguese accounts, especially those by d'Orta and Costa, contain copious information on local medical practice in western India in the sixteenth century. I intend to produce a fuller analysis of this matter on some later occasion.

31 The Voyage of Nicholas Downton (London, Hakluyt, 1938), p. 135.Google Scholar See pp. 135–6 for an affecting account of a death from the ‘bloudy fluxe.’

32 Browne, John letter of 30 May 1616 in Foster, William (ed.), Letters Received by the East India Company from its Servants in the East (London, 1896–1902), 6 vols, IV, 106–7.Google Scholar

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35 Bernier, Françpis, Travels in the Mogul Empire, 1656-1668, trans, and ed. Constable, A. and Smith, V. (London, 1914), pp. 253–4, 338–9.Google Scholar These pages constitute an excellent account of Indian medicine by an informed and experienced observer.

36 When I write of ‘quacks’ and ‘folk medicine,’ I do not mean to be overly influenced by what we think are modern medical methods, and to test the past in accordance with what we, social historians with only a spotty expertise in medicine anyway, think is ‘correct’ and ‘scientific’ practice today. Andrew Wear claims that in his recent edited collection of studies ‘the nineteenth-and twentieth-century values of the medical profession which in past history of medicine had been applied to earlier periods to condemn empirics, quacks, magical and religious practitioners have been discarded. In the process a much richer medical world has been uncovered.’ Wear, Andrew (ed.)Medicine in Society: Historical Essays (CUP, 1992), introduction, p. 2.Google Scholar

37 Correia-Afonso, Godinho, 38; Linschoten, I, 235–6.Google Scholar For the claim that nineteenth- century cholera was new, see Arnold, ‘The Indian Ocean as a Disease Zone’, pp. 7–8. The vexed matter of the newness of cholera in the nineteenth century is too complex to be gone into here, but certainly cholera takes various forms, and it is my understanding that a disease which produced death so quickly from diarrhoea and dehydration can be nothing but some sort of cholera. It is also worth noting that the ‘bloody flux’ was not cholera, as this disease does not produce blood in the stools.

38 John Ovington, pp. 204–5.Google Scholar These accounts point to the Europeans using the hot-iron method as a cure, but an account from the 1750s seems to say this was an Indian remedy, though the observer still thought it worked quite well: ‘There is likewise known on the Malabar-coast chiefly, a most violent disorder they call the Mordechin, which seizes the patient with such fury of purging, vomiting and tormina [?] of the intestines, that it will often carry him off in thirty hours. For this the physicians among the natives know no more eflectuall remedy, than the actual cautery applied to the soles of the feet, the powerful revulsion of which rarely fails of a salutary efficacy.’ Grose, John Henry, A Voyage to the East Indies … to which is added a Journey from Aleppo to Busserah, over the Desert, by Mr. Charmichael, 2nd English edn, 2 vols (London, 1772), I, 250.Google Scholar

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55 Ovington, pp. 205–6. Yet the hostile Dr Fryer could claim that ‘the Urine they will not look on.’ Fryer, I, 287.Google Scholar

56 Mr. DLF in Luillier, pp. 216–17.Google Scholar

57 Fryer, I, 288. It is another good example of Fryer's biased attitude that he tells on the previous page that Indian doctors ‘pretend to understand the pulse…’ yet now it seems all the English in Surat trusted this doctor to do exactly this. The matter is complicated, for Ovington at the same time and place also claimed ‘I could never learn that our Indian physicians could pretend to that wonderful Knowledge in the Pulse, which those in China could confidently boast of…’, Ovington, p. 206.Google Scholar Yet as we saw above, it seems that Indian doctors monitored the pulse from the thirteenth century.

58 Abbé Carré, Travels, p. 345.Google Scholar

59 Ibid., p. 367.

60 Ovington, p. 205.Google Scholar

61 Correia-Afonso, Godinho, p. 70.Google Scholar

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63 For a good discussion, see Pagel, Walter, ‘Paracelsus: Traditionalism and Medieval Sources’, in Stevenson, Lloyd G. and Multhauf, Robert P. (eds), Medicine, Science and Culture (Baltimore, 1968), pp. 51–75.Google Scholar

64 Wear, Andrew, ‘Introduction’, in Wear, Andrew (ed.), Medicine in Society, p. 5.Google Scholar See also on these general changes other articles in this excellent collection, and two other compilations: Wear, Andrew, French, Roger and Lonie, I. M. (eds), The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century (CUP, 1985),Google Scholar and French, Roger and Wear, Andrew (eds), The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (CUP, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the fifteenth entury, see a short useful study by French, Roger: ‘Medicine in Western Europe during the Fifteenth Century’, in Marques, Mario Gomes and Cule, John (eds), The Great Maritime Discoveries and World Health, pp. 39–54.Google Scholar

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66 Adas, Michael, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, Cornell UP, 1989), pp. 6, 21–2.Google Scholar

67 Ibid., pp. 55–6.

68 Arnold, , ‘Introduction’, p. 11.Google Scholar

69 Arnold, ‘Occidental Therapeutics and Oriental Bodies’.

70 Bernier, pp. 253–4, 338–9.Google Scholar

71 Ibid., p. 339.

72 Ibid., pp. 338–9.

73 Markham, Clements, Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India by Garcia da Orta [a translation of Conde de Ficalho, Lisbon, 1891–5] (London, 1913), no. 36.Google Scholar

74 See, as one more example to add to those already quoted from Fryer in the text, Fryer, I, 285–6, where he begins a long description of disease in Surat by saying ‘The Diseases reign according to the Seasons, the North blowing, Bodies are rendered firm, solid and active by exhausting the Serous Humours…’. In fairness, however, it must be noted that some diseases are seasonal in India. Cholera is most prevalent in the rainy season. Smallpox spreads better in dry weather, that is, from February to May, which is also the time of much travelling for pilgrimage and weddings in India. See Arnold, ‘Smallpox and Colonial Medicine’, pp. 46–7.Google Scholar

75 Fryer, I, 287.Google Scholar

76 Fryer, III, 94.Google Scholar

77 Olearius, p. 338.Google Scholar

78 Manucci, II, 333.Google Scholar

79 Mr. DLF in Luillier, p. 213.Google Scholar

80 Olearius, p. 338.Google Scholar

81 Fryer, III, 96.Google Scholar

82 Abbé Carré, pp. 284–5.Google Scholar

83 Ibid., p. 598.

84 Ibid., p. 624. Not, however, that all Europeans were particularly expert. See ibid., pp. 369–70, for the story of a French quack, who did at least examine an ill Portuguese ‘by all the laws of Hippocrates and Galen…’.

85 Sarkar, Jadunath, Studies in Aurangzib's Reign, 3rd edn (London, 1989), p. 56.Google Scholar

86 Fryer, I, 286. I am planning a separate study of the professionalization of medicine in Portuguese Goa.Google Scholar

87 Ovington, p. 205. David Arnold tells me that in the first half of the nineteenth century bleeding, well on the wane in Europe, was all the rage in India, for it was thought that drastic remedies were needed in such tropical places. Personal communication from Prof. Arnold.Google Scholar

88 Fryer, III, 95.Google Scholar

89 Mr. DLF in Luillier, p. 215.Google Scholar