Cliff Richard - Forty Days, 1960

चतुर्विंशातिः दिननानि 40 days!!!

Let's learn some logic today.
I am sure we have the heard the word अशौच (ashauca) before.

It means impure and usually most cultures practice a 40 day अशौच period after a death/funeral and even after childbirth.

So why चतुर्विंशातिः दिननानि (caturviMshAtiH dinanAni)( 40 days)?

Now it gets interesting! Because its purely a medical reason and not a superstition.

Isolating a person for 40 days used to be practiced in ancient times to prevent spread of disease and also to protect a vulnerable person from disease.

40 days after a funeral is to protect general public from a house that had a funeral in case the cause of death was an infective one.

40 days of isolating a woman who delivered a baby is to protect her getting infections from outdoors and others.

More facts! The word Quarantine too is derived from the 40 day concept.

The famous ancient  Persian scholar of medicine Ibn Sina(Abu Ali Al-Hussein Ibn Abdullah Ibn Sina)  used to apply the 40 day principle of isolating people to prevent a chain of transmission of infective diseases.

He called it the Al-arba'iniya(The Forty).

Traders from Venice then took back this information to Italy and the practiced it there too calling it Quarantena(The Forty) in the Italian language and the word Quarantine in English is derived from the Italian word Quarantena.

There you go, its finally all science and not superstition if only properly understood.