Miscarriages of Justice: demonic vengeance in classical Indian medicine Dominik Wujastyk Some people say pregnant women smell sweet, like a melon, and that is why they attract evil spirits. 1 Introduction In the classical tradition of Indian medicine, called ¯ ayurveda in Sanskrit, disease is seen as being caused by several agencies, including the supernatural. The question of disease etiology in ¯ ayurveda is of great interest, and is far from simple. One of the central etiological ideas in ¯ ayurveda is the ‘crime against wisdom’ (praj˜ n¯ apar¯ adha), the idea that we fall ill through – to put it at its mildest – lapses of judgement. At its strongest, the idea proposed in the ancient medical compendia is that the immutable law of karma punishes us with disease for past abrogations of our integrity. 2 In the present essay I shall discuss some of the issues surrounding demonic possession viewed as medical punishment. There is a great deal about this topic in the classical treatises on ¯ ayurveda, and it is treated by both ancient and medieval authors as an important part of the classical tradition of medicine. Given what the Sanskrit medical texts say about demonic possession, this essay inevitably becomes a meditation on the historically persistent and all too human tendency to add the weight of criticism, guilt and moral condemnation to the burden of natural suffering through illness or disease. Amongst the most painful and difficult of all human conditions is the sickness or death of a child, whether before, during, or after childbirth. And while this is of course a shared pain for everyone around the child, the earlier in the process the disaster occurs, the more intimately the event involves the child’s mother in particular. It might seem, therefore, inhumanly harsh to make the mother the focus of special judgement and condemnation, and yet this is what we see again and again. Voices of sympathy or support are rare in the medical literature. More usual is the depiction of the woman as having caused her own disaster by laying herself open to demonic attack. 1