People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 December 1893 — MEDICAL LORE OF THE ORIENT. [ARTICLE]

MEDICAL LORE OF THE ORIENT.

Documents of tho Seventh Century Recently Pound by a Missionary. We have on more than one occasion suggested that a vast field of medicohistorical research exists in oriental, more especially in Chinese, territory, and we have now to record an important “find” in confirmation of our surmise, says the London Lancet. This time it is the region beyond our Cashmere frontier —the hill country between Chinese Leh and Yarkand —that had been laid under contribution, and the treasure-trove in question is due to the sagacious inquiries of a Moravian medical missionary, Mr. Weber, whose station is at Leh. He received it from an Afghan coadjutor—a past master in sucli investigation —and it consists of a series of manuscripts dating from the seventh century A. D., and deals with medicine and its traditionally allied subjects of astronomy and witchcraft. The documents were handed by Mr. Weber to Dr. lloernle, of the Bengal Asiatic society, whose well-known skill in oriental paleography at once recognized their tenor, as also the material on which they were written. This latter is identical with the paper still used by the Himalayan tribes, being composed of the same vegetable fibers and not of the birch bark employed for the writings brought to England by Capt. Bowen. Dr. Uoernle ascribes the good preservation of the manuscripts first to the dryness of the surrounding air and next to their having been “sized” with white arsenic, lie gives a translation of one of the spells for inducing fever, presumably as a punishment or in revenge—a spell eminently charactistic of its Chinese origin, and interesting not only to the medical historian, but also to the student of popular superstitions.