Karkatashringi Indubar, Navasadar and Fitkari- Traditional Family Medicine: Health Series (An Old and Rare Book)

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The system of Medicine as developed in India and known by the name of Ayurveda is reputed in modern times specially among the practitioners and researchers of modern medicine as almost an inexhaustible source of still to be rediscovered wealth of medicinally useful plants, plant parts and plant products. This however should not mean that the drugs employed by Ayurveda are wholly vegetable. They do include unusual sources even among the plants--for instance, the galls and other such peculiar formations as developing on them as direct consequence of an insect infection. The mineral wealth of Ayurvedic drugs is also not at all negligible. There is a whole system of administering mineral, metallic and specially mercurial preparations for all types of ailments in man, constituting an entire discipline by itself termed Rasashastra. Infact there do exist specialised and exclusive Texts like Lohasarvasva (All about iron and metal preparations) whose author definitively claims that he wrote this book mainly for those people who hate taking medicine (bheshaja dvestinam). The recipes he suggests consequently are those that are to be given in very small doses in which situation alone they are very effective.

The drug materials included in the present book illustrate mainly such a class of substances which are not very common in Ayurveda. They are: Karkatashringi— a crab horn like gall formation as found in some plants; chickory or a powder of the roots of a plant most well known as an admixter of coffee but also having quite a few medicinal values; and, two inorganic substances, both of which have popular and effective uses in their own fields namely, navasadar or ammonium chloride and fitkart or alum.