No abstract

This essay looks at the ways in which medical discourse in Sanskrit is linguistically and meaningfully constructed, especially when this discourse directly addresses sexual difference in textual understandings of the ways in which conception, gestation, and the quotidian details of the birth experience are described by the multiple authors of these texts, and in some cases, by their commentators. I see it as my task to uncover and discuss the conceptual position of women in early ayurvedic literature; as objects of practice, but also as medical ̒actors̓ in and of themselves. In my conclusion, I will include some of my own speculations on the transmission of gynecological and obstetric knowledge, on what is ̒public̓ or ̒private̓ knowledge and on what could possibly be construed as ̒male̓ or ̒female̓ science. I will be paying particular attention to the gendered nature of medical authority in my concluding remarks, especially when analysing several circumstances in which women appear as agents and actors. I see āyurvedic texts as part of a larger cultural world: they share information and attitudes with other Sanskrit textual genres, particularly with dharma-śāstras (legal treatises), especially when the subjects in question turn to women and the regulation of their bodies in times of ritual pollution and reproductivity.

No abstract

In general, readers, commentators, translators, and reviewers are bound to see shadows of themselves or of their own concerns in a poem. A poem is, in fact, a “patch” between desire and reality. Like a dream, a poem can be viewed as “reality encoded” (Skura 1981, 126). The issue is not what is actually on the page, what critic Harold Bloom calls the “manifest text” (Bloom 1987, 3). The poem is really what exists in that misty place between “writing” and “reading,” the “latent text,” the poem that lives in symbol or emblem. Though a poem certainly has a static life on a page, the actual events of reading, interpretation, and commentary are what give a poem a vital historical life. We are fortunate that over a millennium and a half of Sanskrit scholarship has yielded up to us actual records of historical moments of reading. And, since these recorded “moments” have become traditionally attached to various types of printed text, many of these commentaries have become as vital as the text itself. In some instances they have even superseded the text, as is true, I believe, in the case of Abhinavagupta's commentary on Ānandavardhana's Dhvanyāloka.

Well-Mannered Medicine: Medical Ethics and Etiquette in Classical Ayurveda. By Dagmar Wujastyk. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. vi + 238. $38.95.