ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the relationship between health and diet, the Caraka introduced the concept of the undigested residue of food that has been consumed in too great quantities. The Caraka is one of the most important surviving works of classical Indian medicine. The chapter describes a series of the most prominent models of disease that were developed in ancient India and that formed part of the ayurvedic tradition. The concept of affinity, or wholesomeness to the individual, appears frequently in ayurvedic theory in the context of models of disease, but has thus far been little explored by medical historians. The ayurvedic commentator Gadadhara, in the eighth or ninth century, regarded undigested residues to be humours, on the grounds that they themselves caused corruption or else because they became connected with corrupted humours. Contagion plays almost no role in classical ayurvedic theory.
