Studies in the Medicine of Ancient India, Part I: Osteology, or the Bones of the Human Body c2.3

c2.3

No satisfactory knowledge of human anatomy can be attained without recourse to human dissection. Of the practice of such dissection in ancient India we have direct proof in the medical compendium of Suśruta, and it is indirectly confirmed by the statements of Charaka. It is worthy of note, however, that in the writings of neither of these two oldest Indian medical writers is there any indication of the practice of animal dissection.¹ Whatever knowledge of the structure of the human body they possessed would seem to have been derived by them from the dissection of human subjects. And, whether or not cases of such dissection were frequent, their surprising proficiency in osteology argues a considerable familiarity with the bones of the human body. As to the Greeks there is indubitable evidence that an extensive practice of human dissection, on dead, and even on living subjects, prevailed in the Alexandrian schools of Herophilos and Erasistratos in the earlier part of the third century B.C. But their knowledge of anatomy appears in some particulars, such as the nervous and vascular systems, so much in advance of that of the early Indians, that, if there was any borrowing on the part of the latter from the Greeks, it must have taken place at a very much earlier period, in the time of Hippokrates and his immediate followers—that is to say, in the second half of the fifth century B.C.