The publisher, who are one of the leading indologists have been publishing such rare books for the last more than ninty years and thus serving the Planet Earth with very rare information and knowledge of the past. This volume is one such book on the Indian Medical Tradition of the hoary past.

Author Dr. Kenneth is a professor of Near Eastern Languages and Literature at New York University and Director of the Indic Traditions of Health Care at Columbia University. He is General Editor of the series on Indian and Tibetan medicine with University of California Press and is Secretary General of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine. He did his doctorate on Medicine in the Hindu Vedic scriptures. Has been studying Indian medicine for over 15 years and has written extensively on the History and principles of Ayurveda.

The book can be divided into two sections. The first section examines the various internal and external diseases that afflicted the Vedic people and the treatments used to cure them. The author includes translations of particular hymns devoted to the eradication of specific illnesses and to the consecration of medicines.

The second section encompasses textual annotations to the individual hymns together with extensive cross-references to other Vedic texts, and a valuable bibliographic essay. Without minimising its magical-religious roots, the author shows how Vedic medicine relied on close observation of phenomena in order to develop its unique form of mythical and religious classifications as well as how the healing system reveals a basic understanding of the relationship between humans and their environment.

This volume has been enriched by insertion of translations and annotations of medical hymns from the Rigveda and the Atharvaveda.