UC Berkeley

This textual and ethnographic project engages touch as a hermeneutic to address questions of medical embodiment and expertise as represented in early first-millennium Sanskrit treatises, the Carakasaṃhitā, Bhelasaṃhitā, and Suśrutasaṃhitā, and in contemporary practice in Kerala. Through a study of the Sanskrit category of sparśa in Āyurvedic ontology, and touch more broadly in epistemology, diagnosis, and treatment, I demonstrate that touch establishes physicians’ bodily and social boundaries, is a nexus for the performance of gendered medical expertise, and is central to communication between humans and non-human selves in the practice of leech therapy. The first main intervention of this study is methodological, as I attend closely to the situated expertise of medieval commentators and sensory experience of contemporary practitioners in my reading of the classical treatises. Second, I argue that the early Āyurvedic treatises articulate significant distinctions in practice, expertise, and bodily boundaries for surgeons and for general physicians in the early first millennium. These divergences evidence a greater sensory intimacy and prioritization of trained tactile skill on the part of surgical physicians in this period. Third, through an examination of tactile practices as represented in the classical treatises, this study demonstrates that specific types of trained touch can constitute forms of treatment and explores the ways that gendered expertise is incorporated into the texts. Fourth, I examine the ways that classical epistemologies are navigated by contemporary Āyurvedic physicians in Kerala through sensory negotiation and yukti (reasoning) in a terrain dominated by biomedicine. The final chapters present an ethnography of contemporary Āyurvedic leech therapy and a close reading of the practice as represented in the Suśrutasaṃhitā and Ḍalhaṇa’s Nibandhasaṃgraha. Here, I challenge scholarship that locates medical agency primarily with physicians or patients and propose vascularity as an analytic for interspecies medical practice.