considerable repute for skill and learning. They were all absent,
and I had not an opportunity of conversing with them; but their
neighbours and friends estimated their monthly professional
income at eight, ten, and twelve rupees, respectively. There are
at most two or three other educated Hindu physicians in
Nattore, and all the rest are professionally uneducated, the only
knowledge they possess of medicine being derived from Bengali
translations of Sanscrit works which describe the symptoms of
the principal diseases and prescribe the articles of the native
materia medica that should be employed for their cure, and the
proportions in which they should be compounded. I have not
been able to ascertain that there is a single educated Musalman
physician in Nattore, and consequently the 34 Mahomedan
practitioners I have mentioned, rank with the uneducated class
of Hindu practitioners, deriving all their knowledge of medicine
from Bengali translations of Sanscrit 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 authorised
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 etc.; and those
which are sold in the druggist’s shop as camphor, cloves, carda-
mums, etc. 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 practise