ORIGINAL PAPER Swapnaushadhi: The Embedded Logic of Dreams and Medical Innovation in Bengal Projit Bihari Mukharji Published online: 3 July 2014 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014 Abstract Numerous medicines in South Asia have their origins in dreams. Deities, saints and other supernatural beings frequently appear in dreams to instruct dreamers about specific remedies, therapeutic techniques, modes of care etc. These therapies challenge available models of historicising dreams. Once we overcome these challenges and unearth the embedded logic of these dreams, we begin to discern in them a dynamic institution that enabled and sustained therapeutic change within a ‘traditional’ medical milieu. Keywords Folk medicine Á Habitus Á Oneiromancy Á Dream-land Á Subaltern therapeutics Introduction On a dark night, sometime in the late eighteenth century, a poor, low-caste physician, Bishnuhari Das, of the village of Chandshi, in present-day Bangladesh, had had a momentous dream. History, unfortunately, is not very good at remembering lowly villagers and their dreams. It would have long forgotten Das and his dream too. But it was the dream itself that confounded History’s elitist amnesia. In the dream, the snake-goddess Manasa had revealed to Das—her devotee—a powerful new healing technique. Using the technique, Das and his heirs built up a huge medical practice. By the end of the nineteenth century, little more than a 100 years after Bishnuhari, the Das family were rich and famous. So iconic was their rise to power, that they now travelled by an elephant, a gift from a grateful patient. Into the twentieth century, Bishnuhari’s method of healing, now known as P. B. Mukharji (&) Department of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail: mukharji@sas.upenn.edu 123 Cult Med Psychiatry (2014) 38:387–407 DOI 10.1007/s11013-014-9387-6