Studies in the Medicine of Ancient India, Part I: Osteology, or the Bones of the Human Body c6.s2.t3.9

c6.s2.t3.9

3. Seeing that the class-list is intended to distribute all the items of the number-list into five kinds, it is evident that the number-list, in the form in which it is found in the Traditional Recension, cannot be correct, but that, in its original and genuine form, it must have contained those two additional items: No. 24, shoulder-blades, and No. 25, eyeballs. It is true that, with reference to No. 24 in the class-list, the Traditional Recension employs the term *aṃsa*, which, in the Compendium of Suśruta, ordinarily denotes the collar-bone; but from the context it is quite obvious that, in the present case, it can refer only to the shoulder-blades. For the bones, here called *aṃsa*, are classed as pan-shaped (*kapāla*)—a description which is applicable only to the shoulder-blades. The collar-bones could only be described as reed-shaped (*nalaka*); and these bones, therefore, must be taken as referred to in the last class or the ‘remainder’ of the list. In literary Sanskrit the word *aṃsa* denotes, in a general way, the shoulder; in medical Sanskrit, at least of the Compendium of Suśruta, the several parts of the shoulder have specialized names: *aṃsa* is the collar-bone, *aṃsa-phalaka* (or *aṃsa-ja*), the shoulder-blade; *aṃsa-kūṭa*, the acromion process, and *aṃsa-pīṭha*, the glenoid cavity. The author of the Traditional Recension would seem to have been a person, who was imperfectly familiar with the anatomical terminology of Suśruta, and used the term *aṃsa* in the undefined literary sense; or more probably it is a scribal error for *aṃsa-ja* or *aṃsa-phalaka*. For a fuller discussion, see §§ 55, 56.