Medicine, Illness and Care in Mughal South Asia

From the Mughal dynasty’s establishment in 1526 through its final decades, ending in 1857, healing in South Asia drew on learned medical books, practitioners at court and local knowledge of foods and drugs. A hakim was a learned physician associated with Persian and Arabic medical writing. Many works in that lineage followed the Canon of Medicine by Avicenna, an influential physician and scholar of the eleventh century. Vaidyas practiced within South Asian medical traditions written in Sanskrit and other languages. Hakim and vaidya learning formed distinct traditions that met in some courts and medical texts.

On this page4 sections

Physicians, courts and hospitals

Physicians moved through imperial and regional networks. Yusuf Haravi served the first Mughal emperor Babur and his son Humayun, writing medical manuals and a glossary of drugs. Under Akbar, Persian-speaking Iranian physicians held influential posts alongside Indian physicians who were not Muslim. Under Shah Jahan, Sati al-Nisa, an Iranian woman, is recorded as a physician attached to his court. Court service brought practitioners into proximity with rulers and nobles, and it supported commentaries and new medical works.

In the earlier Bahmani sultanate, Ahmad II (r. 1435–1457) established a hospital at Bidar. Other accounts mention hospitals in Delhi and Agra in northern India, Fatehpur Sikri, Bidar and Etawah; Indian physicians were employed at hospitals in Bidar and Etawah.

Turning medical learning into usable drugs

The Canon organized medical knowledge into a reference work that physicians could study and explain through commentaries. Hakim Ali Gilani wrote a comprehensive Arabic commentary on the Canon under Akbar, while Fath Allah Gilani translated its first book into Persian in 1593. Other writers made the tradition more useful in South Asian settings by identifying local ingredients and substitutes for drugs that were hard to obtain.

Nur al-Din Muhammad Abdullah Shirazi completed the Alfaz al-Adwiya in 1628–1629. This compact drug dictionary named 1,441 substances, including drugs used in India. In 1646 he dedicated the larger Tibb-i Dara Shikohi to Prince Dara Shikoh; the medical encyclopedia incorporated Indian medical knowledge. Aman Allah Khan’s pharmacological writing also drew on the Madanavinoda, a Sanskrit dictionary of drugs and foods, which he translated into Persian. By gathering names, properties and substitutes in Persian, these works helped practitioners identify drugs and adapt prescriptions to ingredients available in South Asia. In the early eighteenth century, Muhammad Akbar Arzani wrote another Persian commentary on an abridged Canon and a pharmacopoeia, a reference work listing medicinal preparations.

Fever care and the patient’s body

François Bernier, a French doctor who served Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb, described fever treatment in the 1660s in his account of Hindustan. He reported that Hindu and Muslim physicians alike limited meat broth for fever patients, reasoning that a feverish person needed little nourishment and that heavy broth could worsen illness. He also said Muslim physicians used bloodletting more readily when they suspected inflammation of the chest, liver or kidneys. Bloodletting deliberately removed blood. Bernier says physicians might bleed once or twice, sometimes taking eighteen or twenty ounces and sometimes causing fainting.

Bernier also described a dangerous fever that struck Aurangzeb in 1662. The emperor became delirious and could scarcely speak; his physicians feared he would die. Bernier reports that rumors of his death circulated and that a governor might move to free Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb’s imprisoned father. The emperor’s illness thus turned a medical crisis into an immediate question of political control.

Epidemic reports and seasonal illness

In the early seventeenth century, Mughal emperor Jahangir received a report of plague in Agra, in northern India. Well-wishers told him that people were developing swollen glands under the arm, at the thigh joints or beneath the throat, and that outbreaks had returned during three successive winters before subsiding at the start of summer.