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. A physician or physiologistis concerned with the gross physical body.He is not aware of the subtle life force ofthe gross physical body which is not visible to his external sense organs.One whohas developed his inner vision knows the subtle life force in him. 42Because this insight is garnered through South Asian religious practices,most notably disciplines of meditation, yoga, and asceticism, indigenous medical creating space for traditional medicine 29practitioners argue that knowledge of the inner workings of the body is an ancientand unique possession of Indian traditions.Siddha practitioner R.Kasturi wrotein 1970: According to modern medicine, if one wants to see what is inside a body,one needs to dissect a corpse.Siddha practitioners, thousands of years ago, hadclear knowledge about the body, and knew of all the body s internal organs withthe mental eye.Therefore, if one dissects and observes [a body] in this [modern]way, one cannot see the true structure.With the method of new medicine, it is notpossible to discover the empty space in our bodies. 43 Biomedical doctors insist onthe visibility (via two eyes) of knowledge and so they overlook the metaphysicalcomposition of our bodies.They mistakenly approach the problems of health assolely physical, and so their remedies do not address the essence of diseases rootedin the subtle body.It is this empty space of the body that is only perceptibleby means of traditional Indian methods, a bodily space that is likewise an epis-temological space, an aspect of knowledge over which Indian tradition claims amonopoly of expertise.This critique of biomedicine is at the same time a critique of the Westernempirical scientific method, which demands a link between visibility and knowl-edge. The ancient philosophers of Siddha School knew more about the powersthat move the world and of communications of thought at a distance without theemployment of any visible means which is thought current.Modern WesternMedicine knows only the dead body of man and not the living image in him pre-sented by Nature.and so, modern science knows more about the superficialityof things. 44 By claiming to understand both the physical processes that Westerndoctors address and intangible aspects of health and the body as well, traditionalIndian practitioners carve out a discursive space that subsumes Western knowl-edge and so provides the grounds for a critique of Western medicine.At the sametime, they claim that the spiritual essence of their traditional space lies apart fromWestern medical knowledge, invoking a distance that biomedical critique cannottraverse.Most important, they mark out a space below that of biomedicine, notin the sense of being inferior, but rather in the sense that traditional knowledgedescribes the root of things.A second spatial argument that traditional practitioners employ in their bidfor the medical patronage of Indian patients has been to assert autochthonousrelations among the Indian climate, its flora, the diseases prevalent in India, andthe bodily constitution of the Indian people.In their response to a questionnairesubmitted as part of the 1923 Madras Report of the Committee on the IndigenousSystems of Medicine, a Committee convened under the direction of the Presidentof the Eastern Medical Association of Southern India, Madras, a guild of unanipractitioners, invoking natural law rather than divine design, argued that localenvironments have all the material necessary to remedy diseases that prevail in 30 recipes for immortalitya particular region. It is one of the laws of nature that wherever we find a disease,in its very neighbourhood we do find cure for the same disease; that is to say, forthe diseases prevailing in India, we need not go beyond India to procure medicinesto efficiently cure the disease, for there is in India itself plenty of medicines to coun-teract the prevailing diseases. 45 Medical products of the land from which a peopleemerged are sufficient to cure the ailments of that people, an argument against theimportation of foreign medicines.This environmental correspondence is not limited to local medicines andlocal diseases, but extends to local people as well
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