xci
to be used cautiously and tentatively, mixed up with the recipes of the Charaka and the Susruta, which are drawn chiefly from the vegetable kingdom; but they soon began to assert a supremacy of their own and even to supplant the old Ayurvedic treatment by herbs and simples. Nay more, absurd pretentions were set up on behalf of these metallic preparations. Thus in Rasendrachintámani, a work probably co-eval with R. R. S., we come across this remarkable passage:— "Revered teacher! be pleased to instruct me, for the benefit of the weak and the timid, in a mode of treatment which will dispense with the use of the lancet, and both active and potential cauteries," thus putting in a plea for the indiscriminate use of mercurial remedies.
R. R. S. is a typical production of the Iatro-chemical period. The name of treatises treating of medicinal chemistry is simply legion. But they are all cast in the same mould, and the close similarity of their contents would render their translation only a
