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VICISSITUDES OF INDIAN
[Chap. XI.

to their court and liberally treated. Some of the recent works on Medicine, mostly compendiums of larger treatises on the subject, were written during this period.

The power of the Peshwas was overthrown by the English, and from the fall of the Marathas dates the decline of the native medical art, which lost all its material support. The English came with a pre-conceived notion that the Indian medicine was quackery, and the Hindoo works on the subject a repository of sheer nonsense. They established medical schools and colleges — an inestimable boon, no doubt — but looked upon the healing art of the land with supreme contempt. The Indians, on the other hand, with a natural dislike for everything foreign, supposed amputation and dressing of wounds to be the Alpha and Omega of the Western medical science.