This article discusses the categories of health-illness and body-mind in the ayurvedic medicine of india and the contemporary biomedicine in as much as socio-cultural institutions and knowledge systems. For this, some socio-cultural, historic, linguistic, political and economic dimensions of each medical system are addressed, looking beyond their construction as merely scientific-technical fields. Thus, what in the ayurvedic medicine is constructed as a relationship between a physical body and "subtle" body, in biomedicine is constructed as body-mind. And increasingly with the emphasis on brain function the old body-mind dichotomy is becoming body-brain. Similarly, while ayurvedic medicine focuses on the personal and the emotional, biomedicine does it in body and illness.