Postmodernism, now fading partly into orthodoxy, partly into irrelevance, brought two new academic metaphors into common usage, especially in the fields of cultural studies and anthropology.1 The first is the metaphor of writing, derived mainly from work by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Using this metaphor, we can talk of discourses, textualities, inscriptions, readings, and deciphering. All experience and explanation is modeled on the act of reading and textual reception. For example, bodies may be described as "cultural artifacts, fabricated both in the writing and reading of 'body texts.'…As soon as one 'knows' one's own or another's body, it has been written discursively;…Anatomy, epidemiology, psychology, medical sociology and other body-texts frame bodies…which exercise power over its reading" (Fox 1997: 45). The second decisive metaphor, associated in particular with Michel Foucault's work on the history of madness and the evolution of clinics, is that of the human being as a body. For Foucault, the medical encounter is a supreme example of surveillance, whereby the doctor investigates, questions, touches the exposed flesh of the patient.…In the doctor's surgery, the body is rendered an object to be prodded, tested and examined.…The body is owned by the medical system, while in mental illness the body is the apparatus by which the brain is kept restrained, often against the owner's will (Lupton 1994: 24).This is an example of metaphorical metonymy or synecdoche, the use of part of an object to refer to the whole (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: chapter 8). It may seem provocative to claim that speaking of the person as a body is an example of metaphorical language, yet it is a point worth insisting upon. In other cultures and at other times it is not always the case that the body is the first notion that comes to mind when reference is made to a human being. One of the common teachings of many branches of philosophy in ancient India was precisely the importance of breaking the link of identification with embodiment (abhiniveça), a view that presupposes a concept of the person as distinct from embodiment, while at the same time recognizing the widespread existence of this identification and its problematic nature.

Indian medicine, as a systematic and scholarly tradition, begins historically with the appearance of the great medical encyclopedias of Caraka, Suśruta and Bhela about two thousand years ago. 1 These are the oldest Indian medical texts we have, and also the most influential. Just as Pān . ini's famous linguistic study of Sanskrit leaps into the historical record fully formed, like the Buddha from Queen Maya's side, so the medical encyclopedias too emerge with a learned medical tradition in an almost fully articulated form.[B-heading] The antecedentsIn the case of Pān . ini, we do have some preceding literature, which shows us traditional Indian linguistics in its childhood, so to speak, notably the Nirukta of Yāska, as well as the various śiks . ā and prātiśākhya texts. But in the case of medicine far less precursory material has survived. Early medical texts which are now known only by name include the Jatūkarn . atantra, the Hārītasam . hitā, the Parāśarasam . hitā, and the Kharanādasam . hitā, all of which apparently existed at the time of Śivadāsa who commented on the Carakasam . hitā in the fifteenth century. Other lost works include the

In 1396 (798/799), two hundred years before Vesalius, the Persian author Mans : ur ibn Muh : ammad ibn Ah : mad ibn Y usuf ibn Faq h Ily as composed a treatise on anatomy entitled Tas : r h :-i Mans : ur that summarized many of the observations of Galen. It was not the first such treatise to be composed in the Islamic world, but it was the first to be accompanied by drawings of the human body in anatomical detail. About seventy manuscripts containing these drawings survive to the present day, scattered in libraries from Baghdad to Paris, and of course in the Wellcome Library in London. This tradition of anatomical illustrations has been known to medical historians as the F€ unfbilderserie or ''Five-picture'' series since the early study by Karl Sudhoff. 1 In fact, as the series has become better known through the study of a wider sampling of manuscripts, it has become clear that it consists of six, seven, or even more standard images. This Persian tradition of anatomical illustration has many interesting features and questions associated with it, which have more recently been discussed by Roger French, Emilie Savage-Smith, and others. 2 For the present purposes, however, it is sufficient for us to see one of these images, in order to recognize the main pictorial details of this tradition. Figure 1 shows an example. These figures typically face the viewer (although one of the other standard figures faces away), the legs are bent, the hands are on the thighs, the head is circular, the internal organs, including intestines, are displayed, and labelled with text. After Islam, and in particular the Mughal dynasty, had established itself decisively as a cultural power in the South Asian subcontinent, manuscripts such as these were copied in

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A widely-known painting currently in the Wellcome Library (Iconographic 574912i) depicts an anatomical view of the male human body according to the tenets of classical Indian medicine, or ayurveda. The painting is surrounded by text passages in the Sanskrit language on medical and anatomical topics. In this paper, the Sanskrit texts are identified, edited, translated and assessed. I establish a terminus a quo for the painting, and explore the relationship of text and image.