Studies in the Medicine of Ancient India, Part I: Osteology, or the Bones of the Human Body c5.15

c5.15

¹ Suśruta devotes two whole chapters (the seventh and eighth of the Sūtra Sthāna) to the description of surgical instruments, and one whole chapter (the twenty-fifth) to the principles of surgical operation. Charaka appears to speak of surgical operations in two places of his Compendium. The operation of laparotomy is described in the Cikitsita Sthāna, ch. xviii, verses 179 ff. (Jīv. ed., p. 653); and an operation for the extraction of a dead foetus is briefly mentioned in a clause of the Śarīra Sthāna, ch. viii, § 64 (p. 364). In neither of these cases, however, is any surgical instrument named. Moreover, chapter xviii (on Udara) was not written by Charaka at all, but by Dṛḍhabala, who extracted his information from Suśruta’s Compendium (Cik. Sth., xiv, pp. 454-5), where the appropriate instrument (vrīhimukha, a kind of trocar) is named; and the clause in chapter viii is probably a similar interpolation of the same Dṛḍhabala.