द ब्यूटीफुल ट्री: १८वीं सदी में भारत की स्वदेशी गुरुकुल शिक्षा (धर्मपाल)

considerable repute for skill and learning. They were all absent, and I had not an opportunity of conversing with them; but their neighbours and friends estimated their monthly professional income at eight, ten, and twelve rupees, respectively. There are at most two or three other educated Hindu physicians in Nattore, and all the rest are professionally uneducated, the only knowledge they possess of medicine being derived from Bengali translations of Sanscrit works which describe the symptoms of the principal diseases and prescribe the articles of the native materia medica that should be employed for their cure, and the proportions in which they should be compounded. I have not been able to ascertain that there is a single educated Musalman physician in Nattore, and consequently the 34 Mahomedan practitioners I have mentioned, rank with the uneducated class of Hindu practitioners, deriving all their knowledge of medicine from Bengali translations of Sanscrit works to the prescriptions of which they servilely adhere. The only difference that I have been able to discover between the educated and uneducated classes of native practitioners is that the former prescribe with greater confidence and precision from the original authorities, and the latter with greater doubt and uncertainty from loose and imperfect translations. The mode of treatment is substantially the same, and in each case is fixed and invariable. Great attention is paid to the symptoms of disease, a careful and strict comparison being made between the descriptions of the supposed disease in the standard medical works and the actual symptoms in the case of the patient. When the identity is satisfactorily ascertained, there is then no doubt as to the practice to be adopted, for each disease has its peculiar remedy in the works of established repute, and to depart from their prescriptions would be an act of unheard of presumption. If, with a general resemblance, there should be some slight difference of symptoms, a corresponding departure from the authorised prescription is permitted, but only as regards the medium or vehicle through which it is administered. The medicines administered are both vegetable and mineral. The former are divided into those which are employed in the crude state, as barks, leaves, common or wild roots, and fruits etc.; and those which are sold in the druggist's shop as camphor, cloves, carda- mums, etc. They are administered either externally or in the forms of pill, powder, electuary, and decoction. The preceding class of practitioners consists of individuals who at best know nothing of medicine as a science, but practise 316