Penicillin: An Ancient Ayurvedic Medicine

Abstract

In the early history of its commercial and administrative presence on the Indian subcontinent British servants of the East India Company treated native healers of south Asia with as much respect as they treated English physicians. In part, this respect was provoked by the European belief that certain illnesses were caused by the airs and water of a country (Jones 1967); hence treatment of such illnesses required the diagnostic skill as well as pharmacological knowledge of the physicians of that country, in this case the hakims and vaidyas. To this personal view must be added the Company’s considerable interest in the discovery of useful native plants, such as medicines and dyes, the knowledge of which was published in the early issues of Asiaticke Researches, later the Journal of the Asiatic Society. The journal, and indeed the Society, was founded by a group of Englishmen, trained in the classics, who developed an interest in the ancient languages and civilizations of the Indian subcontinent. Even though in some cases these Englishmen, dubbed Orientalists, might have thought the Brahmans of Bengal to be poorly qualified, indeed degenerate, inheritors of a glorious civilization, this did not diminish their respect for the civilization itself. ‘Native doctors’ were attached to regiments and civil stations; and ayurvedic medicine was taught in conjunction with English medicine at the Calcutta Sanskrit College, founded with Company support in 1824 (Gupta 1976: 369).