Patrick Olivelle, Professor Emeritus of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, has been for several decades a renowned guru on ancient India’s religious and social customs. In this intriguing article, Mr Olivelle explains how medical professionals had to reinvent themselves in ancient India.
The challenge for medical professionals was that until about 300 BC, they were seen as hucksters. Mr Olivelle writes: “…we have a long line of Dharmashastras, the major textual tradition dealing with religious, civil, and criminal law, and providing guidance to living a virtuous life that disparages the medical profession and prohibits social and religious interaction with medical practitioners. They are saddled with numerous social and religious disabilities. Manu (4.220), for example, prohibits eating the food of medical professionals or inviting them to any religious ritual:
The food of a medic is pus; the food of a lascivious woman is semen; the food of a usurer is excrement; and the food of an arms merchant is filth.
The Mahābhārata (5.35.37) lists medics among people who should not be called as witnesses in a court of law.
The texts of Ayurveda too appear to recognise that their profession had an image problem. If you were walking down the main street of a town or city in ancient India, you would encounter all sorts of people trying to sell you a variety of goods from gold to garlands. That was unsurprising then, as it is now.
But there would be one thing surprising: you would notice a few strange fellows dressed gaudily and carrying books. They try to pick up clients, people who may have sick children, or relatives at home. They are the ancient medical equivalent of the modern-day ambulance chasers. Here is how Caraka (Sutrasthana, 29.8–13), the author of the oldest extant medical treatise, portrays these medical hucksters trying to peddle their cures:
Cloaking themselves with the garb of physicians and becoming thorns to the people, these fakes wander across countries. This is how one can recognize them: being extremely pompous in the attire of a doctor, they stroll down the market streets because of their yearning to obtain work; and when they hear that someone is sick, they rush toward him.”
To deal with this image problem, Indian medics seemed to have adopted a two-pronged strategy. Firstly, they came up with a standard name for themselves – ‘Vaidya’ – much like CAs and CFAs do in contemporary financial circles. Mr Olivelle writes: “ In the Ayurvedic texts, we have evidence that the leaders of the medical profession were trying to clean up their image and get rid of charlatans among them. As part of that initiative, they invented a new term – vaidya – to designate a physician…We cannot be far wrong in dating the widespread use of ‘vaidya’ for a medical practitioner to the beginning of the common era. The use of ‘vaidya’ is associated with the attempt within the emerging medical profession of Ayurveda to professionalise medical education and to elevate the status of the doctor.”
Secondly, they created an elaborate pedagogy regarding what was required to become a ‘vaidya’: “The elaborate initiation into medical education, which is deliberately modelled after the Vedic rite of initiation (upanayana), further strengthens the thesis that organised medical education sought to elevate the status of a physician. Both these reasons—knowledge and initiation—for the new status of a vaidya are presented by Caraka in a significant passage (Cikitsasthāna, 1.4.52-53):
At the complete acquisition of knowledge (or, conclusion of study), the second birth of a physician is said to take place, for he obtains the title of doctor; one is not a doctor through the earlier birth.
At the complete acquisition of knowledge, the Brahman’s or seer’s spirit enters him firmly because of his knowledge; therefore, the doctor is declared to be a twice-born (dvija).
What these two verses clearly do is anchor the exalted status of a physician on the fact that he is a learned doctor (vaidya)…
Quite the opposite of this are the companions of diseases and destroyers of lifebreaths. Cloaking themselves in the garb of physicians and becoming thorns to the people, they wander across countries because of the negligence of kings, having the characteristics of a fake. (Caraka, Sūtrasthāna, 29.8-13)”
Mr Olivelle explains that so successful was this repositioning of the medical profession in ancient India that Emperor Ashoka started using the repute of Indian medics as a diplomatic tool with the border states: “Emperor Ashoka, writing in the middle of the third century BCE, spoke of his diplomatic initiatives, which included foreign aid in the form of medical materiel and know-how:
Everywhere — in the territory of the Beloved of Gods, King Piyadasi, as well as in those at the frontiers, namely, Codas, Pandyas, Satiyaputras, Keralaputras, Tamraparnis, the Greek king named Antiochus, and other kings who are that Antiochus’s neighbours — everywhere the Beloved of Gods, King Piyadasi, has established two kinds of medical services: medical services for humans and medical services for domestic animals. (Rock Edict II)” [Note: Piyadasi is another name for Ashoka.]
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