Studies in the Medicine of Ancient India, Part I: Osteology, or the Bones of the Human Body c6.s3.t1.14

c6.s3.t1.14

3. The following points may be observed. In the first place, the list of Vāgbhaṭa contains every item of the Suśrutiyan Traditional Recension (§ 27). To these it adds Nos. 1, 18, 19, 23, 29 from the list of Charaka (§ 4), aggregating 57. This aggregate is short of the required sixty by three. From Nos. 15 *b* and 25, in column II, it appears that Vāgbhaṭa I obtained the required three by adding four to No. 25 and deducting No. 15 *b*; that is to say, he counted thirteen neck-bones, instead of nine, and omitted the anal bone as a separate item. The reason for his adopting this, apparently, very arbitrary proceeding can only be conjectured. The following however suggests itself. It is significant that Vāgbhaṭa’s No. 25 numbers thirteen, the exact sum of Suśruta’s Nos. 25 and 26. Both these two items constitute the same part of the body: in Sanskrit, both *grīvā* and *kaṇṭha* denote the neck, the former referring more especially to the posterior, the latter to the anterior portion. This being so, Vāgbhaṭa placed to the credit of No. 25 the aggregate amount thirteen, which Suśruta had divided between Nos. 25 and 26. But as he thus obtained one bone in excess (i. e. four instead of three) he saved one bone by counting the two bones in Nos. 15 *a* and 15 *b* as constituting a single bone. He could do this all the more readily as he could not help observing that in the system of Charaka (as will be shown in § 60) the sacrum and coccyx (or anal bone) constitute but a single bone, which that system includes among its forty-five bones of the vertebral column.