Dear Dr. Cox,
Thank you for your detailed post. In fact, my post was partly triggered by YS's article in his 'South India under the Cholas'. YS notes that "There is however nowhere any hint to say that the Vaidya family was a Brāhmaṇa family." While the names discussed by YS
do not identify the maGkala- titleholders explicitly as brahmins, I am aware of inscriptions where it is very clear that brahmin physicians had maGkala- titles. In 2006 I sent the following information to a friend to be forwarded to YS and forgot about it.
"The mangala title is found in connection with a brahmin who was also a medical specialist in the 15th century as in azakiyamaNavALa maGgalAdarayar putran zrInivAsan An2a zrIraGga garuDavAhana paTTar (EI 24, no. 13, pp. 90-101)"
I do not know if this information reached YS. So when YS's new book has repeated the views expressed in his 2001 article, I wanted to revisit the issue since I have also come across another brahmin physician of the 11th century with the maGkala title.
(Incidentally, according to EI, this garuDavAhana paTTar was the author of divyasUricarita. garuDavAhana bhaTTa/paNDita seems to have been a traditional name given to the descendants of the family who were physicians in charge of the hospital in zrIraGgam.)
So far, I have not come across the use of maGgala- title for physicians in north India. My own hypothesis is that the title is of South Indian provenance because of the way bards, priests, and washermen were considered to engender auspiciousness and because of the priestly role of barbers. (For discussions related to barbers, see pp. 21-22 and 47 of http://www.soas.ac.uk/research/publications/journals/ijjs/file46109.pdf). This seems to have influenced the brahmins of the south too to emphasize their auspiciousness. Interestingly, the Vaidya family of Karavandapuram with the maGkala-titles (present day Kalakkadu in Tirunelveli district) is praised to have been well-versed in instrumental and vocal music too.
Regards,