Health, medicine and the body

Detailed chapter description

Chapter argument. Health in early Mithilā–Videha, Vajji and Aṅga must be reconstructed from bodily vulnerability, care relationships, urban infrastructure, monastic regulation, specialist healing and the environmental conditions of dense settlement. The chapter does not project classical Āyurveda backward as a fully formed regional system, diagnose ancient populations from modern disease maps, or turn wells and drains into evidence for hospitals. Instead it separates archaeological, Buddhist, Jain, Mauryan inscriptional and later medical-textual evidence, then asks where they genuinely converge. A social history of health in early Mithilā–Videha, Vajji and Aṅga must begin from ordinary bodily vulnerability: hunger, fever, digestive illness, wounds, childbirth, ageing, exhaustion, infection and the environmental burdens of dense settlement. The evidence does not permit a regional catalogue of diagnoses in modern biomedical terms, and it does not justify describing every early treatment as “Ayurveda.” What survives is a patchwork. Archaeology records water installations, drains, food remains, tools and settlement conditions; Buddhist and Jain texts preserve rules about illness, medicine and bodily discipline; narratives celebrate healers; and the Mauryan inscriptions speak of royal provision for treatment and medicinal plants. Classical medical compendia systematise knowledge more fully, but their surviving forms are later and layered. The historical task is therefore to reconstruct practices and institutions at the level the evidence can sustain: who cared for the sick, what resources were mobilised, how illness altered rules and work, how ascetic communities understood the body, and how towns attempted to manage water and waste.