The Cambridge encyclopedia of human paleopathology

whose composition began at about the time of the Buddha (d. c. 400 BC). Sigalea describes the early medicine recoverable from Vedic and Upanisadic sources, its relationship with the nascent Indian philosophical schools, and the formation of the Sanskrit medical canon. In the following thirty chapters he provides a comprehensive account of Indian classical medicine, including the formation of the human body, its relationship to the ecological environment, nosology, diagnosis, prognosis, pathology, and a wide range of therapies, including surgery. The final ten chapters of this part of the book cover subjects such as veterinary medicine, public health, medicine and the law, and the specific contribution to medicine made by India's rich religious heritage, including yoga, Tantra, Buddhism and Jainism. He also examines the relationship between ancient Indian and Greek medical traditions. A final, very brief chapter deals with Indian medicine from 1300 to the present. This is a very interesting period, in which ayurveda continued to evolve energetically, and was eventually influenced by, and began to influence, European medical practice; it is also the period in which traditional practitioners have had to come to some accommodation with the modern biomedical model of medicine. In contrast to the detailed treatment of classical doctrines in the earlier chapters, these topics are only touched upon. The second part of the book deals with the Islamic medical milieu of the Moghul and Sultanate courts, and is based on the biographies, chronicles and memoirs of the rulers, chiefly written in Persian and Arabic. The main organizing principle of this part is the lives of the Moghul rulers from Babur to Aurangzeb, who are described in historical sequence. Chapter nine presents a summary of Islamic medical thinking, and later chapters include interesting biographies of individual court physicians, including a female surgeon from Delhi. The book ends with an account of the medical information reported by European travellers in India from the sixteenth century onwards. Both parts of the work are written on the basis of translations and secondary literature, but Sigalea has made excellent and judicious use of these materials, penetrating the subject to an impressive degree. This is a book aimed at an intelligent reading public interested in medicine and the East. It might also have a role as a text (taken with others) in an introductory course on Asian medicine, although its cost would unfortunately limit students' access to library copies. It successfully achieves its goal of presenting a rich panorama of Indian medical history in an accessible and attractive format, while remaining intelligent and well-researched throughout.