Studies in the Medicine of Ancient India, Part I: Osteology, or the Bones of the Human Body c7.s3.t2.13

c7.s3.t2.13

6. The writers hitherto discussed are all medical. It will be observed that they never use the dual number with reference to jatru, as they would do if they were thinking of the pair of clavicles. They always use the singular number, indicating a single bone. Their evidence, on the whole, is uniformly and clearly in favour of jatru denoting in a general way the neck, or more particularly the throat, that is, the anterior part of the neck (grīvā-purobhāga), in short the windpipe. In the list of Suśruta (§ 27) jatru does not occur at all, but it enumerates the pair of bones, grīvā and kaṇṭhanāḍī, the cervical column and the windpipe. The list of Charaka (§ 4), on the other hand, does not name kaṇṭhanāḍī, but gives the pair grīvā and jatru. It is obvious that Suśruta’s kaṇṭhanāḍī must be identical with Charaka’s jatru, and that both those terms denote the same organ, that is, the windpipe.