Studies in the Medicine of Ancient India, Part I: Osteology, or the Bones of the Human Body c5.s1.24

c5.s1.24

¹ The memorial verses, as commonly printed in Mādhava's *Nidāna*, giving a total of seventy-six, are spurious and false. Jīvānanda's edition gives them at the end (p. 347), but Udoy Chand Dutt's edition at the beginning (p. 220) of the chapters on the diseases of the eye. Moreover, they do not agree with Mādhava's own text; for they omit the two diseases of the eyelashes (*pakṣma-kopa* and *pakṣma-śāta*), mentioned by Mādhava at the end of the last of those chapters (Jīv., p. 347, verses 22, 23; U.C. Dutt, p. 236). Adding these two diseases, the total becomes seventy-eight. The various systems of enumerating the diseases of the eye adopted by Suśruta II, Vāgbhaṭa I, Mādhava, and Dṛḍhabala respectively, are very complicated. It is impossible, in the present case, to state more than the simple facts. In a subsequent dissertation on the diseases of the eye I hope to have an opportunity of explaining the details.