Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/199

Rh translations of Sanskrit 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 authorized 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, &c.; and those which are sold in the druggist’s shop as camphor, cloves, cardamums, &c. 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 practice it as an art according to a prescribed routine, and it may well be supposed that many, especially of the uneducated class, are nothing but quacks. Still as a class they rank higher both in general estimation and in usefulness than the village doctors. Of these there are not fewer than 205 in Nattore. They have not the least semblance of medical knowledge, and they in general limit their prescriptions to the simplest vegetable preparations, either preceded or followed by the pronouncing of an incantation and by striking and blowing upon the body. Their number proves that they are in repute in the villages; and the fact is ascribable to the influence which they exercise upon the minds of the superstitious by their incantations. The village doctors are both men and women; and most of them are Mahomedans, like the class to which they principally address themselves.

The small-pox inoculators in point of information and respectability come next to the class of general practitioners. There are 21 of them in Nattore, for the most part brahmans, but uninstructed and ignorant, exercising merely the manual art of inoculation. One man sometimes inoculates from 100 to 500 children in a day, receiving, for each operation a fixed rate of payment