THE MEDICINE OF UNEXPLAINED
Author: Slavyan Stoilov
The question of historical heritage and the degree of its accuracy is an extremely serious problem. The modern style of theorizing requires facts, not speculations, and this is the only source we can depend on - unless, someone is evasive on occultism, mysticism or an religious doctrine. Supposing, that the oral tradition was the primer form of saving an information, consequently, we have to describe its postulates. That means, rhyming appears as the first instrument of learning and this, with the help of a tutor who could explain the unclear passages of the text. The colloquial language, however, is not a stagnant category - it also changes with time. Thus, we have the emergence of a written language which have some different stages of development, cf. semiotics: 1. First stage, or the symbols correspond to a "word" or "morphema" and is called "hieroglyphic". This form of deciphering contains a considerable number of letters and was used for sacred purposes in ancient Egypt, China, Maya and others; 2. Second stage, when the symbols came to denote a "syllable" or "phonema" and where the "alphabet" has as many phonetic sounds as the utterances in the language. Here we have the ancient Hindoo in the form of "sanscrit"; 3. Third stage, is a grammatically solid one. The symbols are in the form of "character" or "vowel-consonant" mix with rules for arranging the body of the text. The civilization in the west is responsible for this language and, mainly, the legacy of the ancient Phoenicia, Greek, Latin and others. Finally, we have to remark that with respect to its usage, language - in the past and in the modern times - have three denominations, namely: sacred, religious and common.
For the transformation of foreign to west european tradition multiple texts were necessary and generations of educated scholars. Today, someone will find it bigotry that the first attempts - with no basis knowledge and literary skills - consisted an incredible amount of effort and enthusiasm. But the question was to go ahead. Foreign languages seldom need a dictionary to study. Different languages have "laws of transcription" and that's why a simple similarity between two terms of the speech is not enough for equality of meaning. The issue is, mechanical translations are impossible and lead to gross errors. This is corroborated, as early as, in the eastern literary tradition. Consider the following example, Box 1:
In Hindoo Sanskrit, the term "dha atisara" means "tropical diarrhea" but, mutatis mutandis, the Tibetian Bonn Buddhist translate the term in the following way: "ars-tahd" - remember that in Tibet, Malaya and some other places the transcription is inverted from the end to the beginning of the word - consequently, this meaning "tropical fever". |
Whatever, the correction in figurative sense were installed not earlier than the 15th century when Europeans, already, moved the border of civilization eastwards and westwards. We do not make commentaries on the personality who makes the correction. With few words, a lot of practice and inspiration from the sources are necessary to study a foreign tradition.
Generally speaking, the basic forms of medicine, according, western civilization criteria can be isolated in three separate groups, namely:
1. Local medical systems - primitive, like tribal "shamanism".
2. Regional medical systems - quasiscientific, like India "ayurveda" and China "yunani".
3. Modern medical systems - cosmopolitan, characteristic with structural organisation of hospitals, schools of thought, scientific institutions, professional associations, technology assessment, etc. Neither, structure have been used before.
Finally, in historical-geographical sense, boundaries are relative values. The latter, in their natural condition are defined by space and time parameters and are rated according the degree of adaptation to certain climatic and cultural limits. Thus, the continent of Eurasia is not monolithic and the areas of different ethnoses are defined in the following way, cf. international politics: 1. First point, Western Europe is divided from Eastern Europe with an invisible climatic isotherm starting from January; 2. Second point, Northern Africa and Near East carrying the historical heritage of the Old World are delimited by desert desolation; 3. Third point, subtropical regions of India and China having a dry and cold isotherm; 4. Fourth point, the mountain localities of Mongolia, Djungaria, Turkestan with their adjective deserts Gobbi, Alashan, Tachlamahan are a steppe where the winter snow cover is over 30 cm thick and hampers the feeding of the stock.
CONTENTS
Chapter I. Medicine as a dimension
Chapter II. Tibetian medical system
Chapter III. Indian medical tradition
Chapter IV. Hellenic medicine
Chapter V. Classical Chinese medicine
Literature
