A tradition of veterinary therapy developed very early in India. Modelled on Āyurveda, Footnote 1 this veterinary medicine is known through a specialised literature which tells us about the ancient methods of prevention and treatment of animal diseases in India before the advent of modern medicine (Mazars 1994, 1999). Some of these treatments, as yet little known outside India, are still practised today.
The surviving texts are concerned mainly with the treatment of horses and elephants. The legends incorporated in these texts present knowledge regarding the medical treatment of horses and elephants as being directly revealed by the gods. This may be explained partly by the need to provide veterinary medicine with an origin similar to that of the Āyurveda, which is also presented as ‘divinely inspired’ knowledge. In fact, veterinary medicine developed from the ayurvedic model over the seven or eight centuries which preceded the Christian era. It is also known, from the inscriptions of...
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- 1.
Āyurveda is a holistic medical system that is explained in detail in an article in the encyclopaedia.
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Mazars, G. (2008). Veterinary Medicine in India. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_8912
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