Foundation for Revitalisation of Local Health Traditions (FRLHT) has invested Rs. 1 crore to set up the country’s first-ever medical manuscript repository. The repository which is coming up close to the present location of FRLHT at Jarakabande Kaval on the Yelahanka road in the outskirts of Bangalore will conserve and preserve the ancient manuscripts. The facility is expected to be commissioned in June 2006.

The Foundation is also is gearing up for a massive drive to conserve the medical manuscripts in collaboration with the National Medical Manuscripts (NMM) to take up the task of co-ordinate a nationwide cataloguing of medicinal manuscripts.

“It is the institutional agenda of FRLHT to achieve this goal and preserve it for posterity. The urgency for initiating the conservation of medical manuscripts is because there exists a real danger of losing a large number of manuscripts due to neglect. On the other hand, access to manuscripts will provide theoreticians and practitioners of the Indian Systems of Medicine valuable knowledge that can be put to contemporary use,” stated Dr. Gangadharan, joint director FRLHT.

To initiate this process and plan for the medical manuscripts work for the next decade, the foundation organised a two-day national seminar on ‘Saving India’s Medical Manuscripts’, sponsored by National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM) where around 75 participants from 39 manuscript centres participated.

“The main objective of the seminar was to assess the need and prepare a realistic action plan to achieve its mission in saving the manuscripts. It was necessary to ascertain the opinion of several manuscriptologists and curators of national and regional manuscript libraries in the country and scholars of different ancient languages and scripts,” informed Dr. Gangadharan.

FRLHT’s mission is to conserve medical manuscripts. At present the published work of Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani, and Swa-rig-pa, put together forms less than one per cent of all the literary corpus of these systems. The knowledge contained in the manuscripts needs to be made available for scholars and researchers.

“Institutions working in this area need to be strengthened and networking amongst research institutions is a priority task,” stated Darshan Shankar, director, FRLHT.

India has one of the largest collections of medical manuscripts in the world. There are around 20,000 to 100,000 manuscripts available at Oriental Manuscripts Libraries, Indological Research Institutions, Universities, Mutts and Archives and many private collections. Manuscripts are also available in foreign libraries in UK, France, Germany, Austria, USA Sri Lanka, Nepal, Thailand, China, Mongolia and Burma.

The first attempt to catalogue Indian medical literature was by the History of Medicine Department, Osmania University in 1958 which was transferred to the Indian Council of Medical Research in 1966 and then in 1969 to the Central Council for Research in Ayurveda and Siddha. In 1970, the material was transferred to the Institute for History of Medicine in Hyderabad, which made around 1082 entries.

According to Dr. Sudha Gopalakrishnan, director, National Mission for Manuscripts, medical manuscripts are available in the country and the cataloguing has started in the three years ago.