The content of the article is a preliminary description of two exhibits from the field of Indo-Tibetan medicine, held by the Ethnographic Museum in Kraków. They come from the areas of Mongolia or Buryatia, from where they were brought by the famous researcher and traveller, J. Talko-Hryncewicz, as a result of his wanderings in those areas in the years 1903–1908.
They are: a collection of medicines (strictly speaking: raw materials for their preparation), consisting of several hundred samples, and a handwritten medical compendium in Tibetan.
This work provides a catalogue description of the collection, containing the Tibetan name of the appropriate medicine in Latin transliteration, its Latin name, possibly also Sanskrit and Polish, and a short description of the contents of the jars in which the samples are located. This is the first description of this kind in Polish and one of the few in world literature. In view of the fact that specialists of various fields are becoming increasingly interested in the still little-researched but extremely interesting concepts and achievements of traditional Tibetan medicine, and also the fact that our collection with its 277 exhibits is one of the leading ones in terms of numbers among similar collections in museums around the world (only twenty or so are known), it should be considered very valuable, and its study a scientific task of great importance. The same applies to the medical manual in Tibetan. It is a large handwritten book, whose author – the famous Mongolian scholar bLo bzang chos ´phel – lists dūrya sgnon po, probably written at the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th century, is a sui generis summary of the long development of Indo-Tibetan medicine, which is why it has a very high scientific value.
This work provides a description of the compendium and its detailed contents (chapter titles in Tibetan and translated into Polish). It is one of only a few similar descriptions existing in world Tibetological literature. One of the most important goals of this work is to interest specialists in various fields of science – ethnographers, historians and practitioners of medicine, pharmacologists – in Tibetan medicine.