Studies in the Medicine of Ancient India, Part I: Osteology, or the Bones of the Human Body c2.9

c2.9

The latest example is presented in Gaṅgādhar’s invention, not quite thirty years ago, of what professes to be the osteological summary of Charaka. In this last-mentioned case, owing to the modernity of the substitute, it is not difficult, by an appeal to the consensus of still existing manuscripts, to expose and prove its baselesness. But that remedy is not available in the case of the osteological summary of Suśruta, the genuine form of which has now disappeared from all available manuscripts, and can be recovered only by a laborious application of textual criticism combined with an appeal to practical anatomy. But what has occurred in the case of the osteological summaries may have happened also to other parts of the ancient Indian texts concerned with anatomy and surgery. These texts require careful scrutiny before they can be trustfully accepted and cited as evidence. The present dissertation is offered as a first example of such an investigation. Of its success I must leave others to judge, only hoping that it may induce more competent hands than mine to take up and continue the inquiry.