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Ayurveda or ayurvedic medicine has more than 2,000 years of history. It is a rational system of medicine based on a humoral interpretation of disease and health. It’s prehistory goes back to Vedic and Buddhist cultures. Although the religious hymns of the Atharvaveda and the Rgveda mention some herbal medicines, protective amulets, and healing prayers that recur in later ayurvedic treatises, the earliest historical mention of the main structural and theoretical categories of ayurvedic medicine occurs in the Buddhist Pāli Tripitaka, or Canon.
Ayurveda can be defined as the system of medicine described in the great medical encyclopedias associated with the names Caraka, Suśruta, and Bhela, compiled and re-edited over several centuries from about 200BC to about AD500 and written in Sanskrit. These discursive writings were gathered and systematized in about AD600 by Vāgbhata, to produce the Astāngahrdayasamhitā (’Heart of Medicine Compendium’) that became the most popular and widely used textbook of ayurvedic medicine in history. Vāgbhata’s work was translated into many other languages and became influential throughout Asia.
Ayurvedic medicine has remained a living system of medical interpretation and therapy in South Asia until today, and is formally supported by the ministries of health in India and Sri Lanka. Throughout the twentieth century it has also had adherents in East and South Africa. In recent decades ayurveda has started to become popular in Europe and North America where it has a taken its place in the portfolio of therapies called Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). This modernized form of ayurveda, sometimes called ‘New Age Ayurveda’ is an adapted and edited form of the tradition. It has been re-imported to India where it is marketed in branded forms to the middle classes in urban centres. Simultaneously, modernized ayurvedic services to the tourist industry, especially in Kerala, have become economically and socially important.