504 



SCIENCES AND SOCIAL ARTS. 



[PART IV 



Medicine. Another branch of royal education was 

 medicine. The Singhalese, from their intercourse with 

 the Hindus, had ample opportunities for acquiring a know- 

 ledge of this art, which was practised in India before it 

 was known either in Persia or Arabia ; and there is rea- 

 son to believe that the distinction of having been the 

 discoverers of chemistry which has been so long 

 awarded to the Arabs, might with greater justice have 

 been claimed for the Hindus. In point of antiquity the 

 works of Charak and Susruta on Surgery and Materia 

 Medica, belong to a period long anterior to Geber, and 

 the earliest writers of Arabia ; and served as authorities 

 both for them and the Mediaeval Greeks. 1 Such was their 

 celebrity that two Hindu physicians, Manek and Saleh, 

 lived at Bagdad in the eighth century, at the court of 

 Haroun al Kaschid. 2 



One of the edicts of Asoka engraved on the second 

 tablet at Girnar, relates to the establishment of a 

 system of medical administration throughout his do- 

 minions, " as well as in the parts occupied by the 

 faithful race as far as Tambaparni (Ceylon), both 

 medical aid for men, and medical aid for animals, toge- 

 ther with medicaments of all sorts, suitable for animals 

 and men." 3 



These injunctions of the Buddhist sovereign of 

 Magadha were religiously observed by many of the 

 kings of Ceylon. In the " register of deeds of piety " in 

 which Dutugaimunu, in the second century before Christ, 

 caused to be enrolled the numerous proofs of his de- 

 votion to the welfare of his subjects, it was recorded 

 that the king had "maintained at eighteen different 

 places, hospitals provided with suitable diet and medi- 

 cines prepared by medical practitioners for the infirm." 4 

 In the second century of the Christian era, a physician 



1 See Dr. BOYLE'S Essay on the 

 Antiquity of Hindu Medicine, p. 64. 



2 Professor Dietz, quoted by Dr. 

 ROYLE. 



3 Journal Asiat. Soc. Benyal, vol. 

 vii. part. i. p. 159. 



4 Mahawanso, ch. xxxii. p. 100. 



