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Studies in the Medicine of Ancient India, Part I: Osteology, or the Bones of the Human Body c7.s1.t7: § 53. Elbow-pan and Knee-cap

Studies in the Medicine of Ancient India, Part I: Osteology, or the Bones of the Human Body c7.s1.t7

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§ 53. Elbow-pan and Knee-cap

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1. Kapālikā or kūrpara, elbow-pan, and jānu or jānuka, knee-cap. There can be no doubt regarding the bones to which these terms refer. They are the olecranon process of the elbow, and the patella of the knee. The former, which ‘in its function and structure resembles the patella’,¹ is not a separate bone, but a process of the ulna (Fig. 8). But by the ancient Indian anatomists, according to their usual practice (§ 44), it is counted as a separate bone. They follow herein our own popular usage which speaks of it as the ‘funny bone’ or ‘crazy bone’.

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¹ Dr. Potter’s Compend of Human Anatomy, p. 47.

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2. The term *kūrpara* is peculiar to Suśruta, who expressly defines it as denoting the homologue of *jānu*, the knee-cap (p. 72), and who may, therefore, have been the first to use it as a denotation of the olecranon process. The term *kapālikā* is peculiar to Ātreya (Charaka and Bheḍa). It means, literally, a small shallow dish, and is therefore identical in meaning with patella, the Latin name of the knee-cap. It well describes the appearance of the olecranon process, which presents, in the ventral view, a concave surface, the so-called great sigmoid cavity (Fig. 8). Accordingly, in this treatise, it has been rendered by ‘elbow-pan’.

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FIG. 10. THE PATELLA, Jānu. From the back, showing interior concave surface.

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3. The term *kapola*, for the elbow-pan, which is found in the Non-medical Version (§ 16), is undoubtedly, as has been explained in § 19, cl. 4, an ancient misreading for *kapāla*, pan, of which *kapālikā* is a diminutive. By way of corroboration it may be mentioned that the Smaller Petersburg Dictionary quotes the form *kapolaka* as a misreading for *kapālaka*, pan. The antiquity of the misreading may be seen from the fact that ancient Sanskrit dictionaries mention *kapoli*, with the meaning knee-cap. The true form, of course, is *kapālī*, a feminine diminutive of *kapāla*, meaning a small pan, or any small pan-like bone, such as the knee-cap or elbow-pan. Similarly, *kapāla* itself is used to denote the larger pan-shaped bones of the cranium (§ 63).

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4. The Atharva Vedic list (§ 43) has the two synonymous terms jānu and aṣṭhīvat. The latter literally means ‘the organ (knee) which possesses a bone (patella)’, and thus, like jānu, comes to denote specifically the knee-cap.

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