Health & Borders Across Time & Culture: China, India & the Indian Ocean Region Special Issue July 2011 (Peer Reviewed) :: Medical Connections and Exchanges in the Early Modern World Michael Naylor Pearson, 2011

[Frederick Noronha]

Earlier European practice had combined bleeding with feeding up the patient. In the following description of medical practice in the Goa Royal Hospital from the 1640s, we find that the Europeans had now decided that a scantier diet was more appropriate, as noted above in the case of the Abbé Carré’s self-cure: 

The hospital at Goa was formerly renowned throughout India; and, as it possessed a considerable income, sick persons were very well attended to. This was still the case when I first went to Goa; but since this hospital has changed its managers, patients are badly treated, and many Europeans who enter it do not leave it save to be carried to the tomb. It is but a short time since the secret of treatment by frequent bleedings was discovered [he presumably means in Goa, for bleeding was of course universally practiced in Europe]; and it is repeated, according to need, up to thirty or forty times, as long as bad blood comes, as was done to myself on one occasion when at Surat; and as soon as the bad blood is removed, which is like an apostume, the sick person is out of danger. Butter and meat are to him as poison, for if he eats them he puts his life in danger. Formerly some small ragouts were made for the convalescent, but they must nowadays content themselves with beef-tea and a basin of rice. (Tavernier 1977: I, 160–161)

Indian practice was quite different, and was described as follows by a French doctor in the mid-1600s. 

On physic they have a great number of small books, which are rather collections of recipes than regular treatises. The most ancient and most esteemed is written in verse. I shall observe, by the way, that their practice differs essentially from ours, and that it is grounded on the following Pearson Medical Connections PORTAL, vol. 8, no. 2, July 2011. 8 acknowledged principles: a patient with a fever requires no great nourishment; the sovereign remedy for sickness is abstinence; nothing is worse for a sick body than meat broth, for it soon corrupts in the stomach of one afflicted with fever; a patient should be bled only on extraordinary occasions, and where the necessity is most obvious - as when there is reason to apprehend a brain fever, or when an inflammation of the chest, liver, or kidneys, has taken place. (Bernier 1914: 338– 339)

Bleeding, then, is an example of Europeans bringing a method with them to India, and with dubious validity. More often they accepted that Indian diseases needed Indian remedies. That some Indian diseases were different and peculiar to the subcontinent was widely acknowledged, and not just by Europeans. One Muslim author considered that there were major problems in applying the Perso-Islamic Yunani (Greek) system to Indians (Ikram 1966: 183). The eccentric alchemist and important early medical innovator Paracelsus in a book published in 1537–1538 stressed that Asian and African prescriptions did not work in Europe, and he also was not certain that his prescriptions would work outside Europe (Lach 1977: 424). In the late seventeenth century a French visitor said that for local diseases European medicines were of no use: ‘For this reason the Physitians that go out of Portugal into these parts must at first keep company with the Indian Surgeons to be fit to Practice; otherwise, if they go about to cure these Distempers, so far different from ours after the European manner, they may chance to Kill more than they Cure’ (Careri’s account in Sen 1949).

 

http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/article/view/1643

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