Before the clinic there was the vaid, practising Ayurveda, and the hakim, practising Unani, and both were common in Punjab, the hakim particularly in the towns and among Muslim families.
Fakir Azizuddin, foreign minister of the Sikh state, was from a family of hakims at Lahore and practised himself.
Their materia medica was local: herbs from the Shivaliks and the bar, minerals, and preparations made in the house. A great deal of that plant knowledge was held by ordinary households as well and is disappearing with the generation that gathered it.
Guru Har Rai Ji maintained a dispensary at Kiratpur that treated anyone who came, which is the earliest institutional medical provision in the Sikh tradition.
Desi dawai, home remedy, is still the first resort in a very large number of Punjabi households and the second is the unqualified practitioner.
Nobody has recorded the household plant pharmacopoeia of a Punjab village, and the people who hold it are old.
The vaid works in Ayurveda and the hakim in Unani, and both were the village's medicine before there was any other, with the pansari, the herb seller, supplying both.
They are still practising. Registered practitioners work under the state's directorate and unregistered ones work anyway, which is the larger number.
The herb knowledge is disappearing faster than the practice. The plants were collected from the Shivaliks and from field edges, and both have been cleared.