Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets: Medicine and Martial Arts in South India by Roman Sieler

Author:Roman Sieler [Sieler, Roman]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Naming the Secret: Vital Spots and Biomedical Terminologies

Despite or, rather, because of such secretive behavior of ācāṉs, patients often seek ways to comprehend and label what they are afflicted with. This is exemplified by the case of a young man who approached Velayudhan because of an ailment, from which he had suffered for several years. Already having been unsuccessfully treated by a variety of practitioners and medical systems, he had decided to consult the ācāṉ. The symptoms included a painful cough, and a constantly blocked nose, forcing him to breathe through his mouth, which he found very difficult. Velayudhan examined the patient’s pulse and eventually pronounced that this was indeed a varmam (ailment), and accordingly treatable. The patient, relieved, asked the name of his disease (nōyiṉ peyar). Shaking his head in negation, the ācāṉ answered that this simply was “varmam.” Obviously unsatisfied with this, the young man, mistaking me for a biomedical professional,15 asked me to explain and name his disease, which, of course, I could not do. Velayudhan attempted to console the patient by describing that he had diagnosed excess kapa tōcam, which aggravated phlegm (caḷi) inside his body, causing a deficiency of pirāṇam circulation. Apparently still not satisfied with this, the patient continued consulting me, asking whether, among other things, this was a “sinus problem.”

This case highlights several aspects: The youth with the mysterious respiratory problems attests to the fact that many patients turn to vital spot medicine as a last medical resort and in the case of chronic ailments, which biomedical treatment could not be cure. Nonetheless, the young man had not been content with the diagnosis of varmam, and reverted to lay biomedical categories rather than the one given by the ācāṉ. It appears that some practitioners recognize this and either concede and cater to the needs of their patients, or promote their practices in biomedical terms. With regard to ayurveda, Naraindas (2006, 2662) has noted that often in urban India “efficaciousness, and the very premises of the dialogue, are framed by the language of biomedicine or some pidgin version of it.” There indisputably is an increasing deployment of biomedical terminology in order to address vital spot ailments and to promote related medical practices by ācāṉs. In particular, signboards of urban and semi-urban dispensaries depict lists of ailments treated by the practitioner. These often and increasingly include the nosological categories of biomedicine in addition to Tamil terms. The Tamil terms are often close or direct translations of biomedical diseases, such as: taṭṭupitukkam, literally “wheel protuberance,” which appears to describe disk prolapse; elumputēyvu, “bone decay,” referring to spondylosis; elumpu tāpitam, “bone heat,” paraphrasing spondylitis; taṭṭuvīkkam, “wheel swelling,” as translation of disk bulging; and so on. This may evidence a practice of promoting vital spot therapies in idioms borrowed from biomedicine. This may also be an attempt to provide options of verbalized explanations of vital spot ailments and treatments. Such processes of naming the secret in biomedical terms then are possibly aimed at patients, who seek to find alternative explanations of varmam than “that which is hidden.

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