A medical treatise in Sinhala script

This is a palm leaf manuscript written in Sinhala script about Indian traditional medicine : treatments for fever, swelling, dysentery, epilepsy. The manuscript describes the symptoms and treatments for each disease. It dates from the end of the 19th century or beginning of the 20th century. It was purchased by a Frenchman who travelled professionally in South-East Asia, mostly India, presumably in the first half of the twentieth century.

The manuscript is composed of 22 palm leaves held together by a cotton string of 3 strands between two carved wooden covers of size 21x4.5cm. The leaves are numbered with non-numerical characters, like most such manuscripts. As explained here, this system is built by 34 consonants and 15 diacritics, forming a cycle of 544 numbering letters, each consonant producing a subcycle of 16 numbering letter. The manuscript starts at number 28 (2-12), which means that the 27 first leaves are missing. Leaf 2-16 is also missing, unless there is a mistake in the numbering of this manuscript (mistakes occasionally happen for manuscripts with hundreds of leaves).

On some of the pages, the text is in verse to help memorize the information, which was then transmitted orally. There are three verses on each of the four lines of the page, and each verse ends with a rhyme letter. These pages alternate with non-verse texts, which are mostly on five lines. There the sentences are separated by kunddaliya ෴.

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I gratefully acknowledge the help of Aravinda and Hasitha Chamikara Gunasinghe who provided the above information. Aravinda also provided the transcription of page 2-16r.