A History of Sanskrit Literature c34.s5.5

c34.s5.5

On the other hand,² we must recognize that we have certain information that both Ktesias (*c.* 400 B. C.) and Megasthenes (*c.* 300 B. C.) visited or lived in northern India, and other facts can be adduced to suggest derivation, especially of surgical doctrine, from Greece. Whatever was the case with Hippokrates, there is no doubt of the prevalence of dissection of the human body in the Alexandrian schools of Herophilos and Erasistratos in the third century B. C., while in India we have no original passage in Caraka which admits of this, though Suçruta has two chapters on surgical instruments and one on the mode of operation. But there is difficulty in postulating Indian borrowing, because the Alexandrians developed such accurate knowledge, comparatively speaking, of the muscular and vascular systems that it is difficult to suppose that India, if it had borrowed its anatomy from Greece, would have been content to remain indifferent to the other advances made in Greece. The definite evidence of relation is rendered almost impracticable of attainment by the absence of any early Greek lists of the bones of the human body as reckoned in Greek surgery. Celsus, it has been noted, giving the Greek osteology of the first century B. C. speaks of the carpus and tarsus as consisting of many minute bones, the number of which is uncertain, but says that they present the appearance of a single, interiorly concave, bone, and in Suçruta and Caraka respectively we have the opposed views of a number of small bones and a single bone. Again, the Greek and the Indian views correspond in regarding the fingers and the toes as consisting each of three joints springing from the metacarpals. Against these facts Hoernle points out that, if a Talmudic summary can be regarded as representing Greek views, which is possible, there must have been a profound difference between the Greek and the Indian enumeration of bones in the body. Greece, of course, borrowed from India the use of several medicinal plants, but there is clearly no ground for the assumption of Indian influence in early days on Greek medicine. The disrepute of anatomy¹ acted as a fatal barrier to the progress of India in the field of surgery and hampered its success in the field of medicine.²