Studies in the Medicine of Ancient India, Part I: Osteology, or the Bones of the Human Body c7.s3.t8.4

c7.s3.t8.4

4. As to the real morphological character of the teeth, the ancient Indian anatomists, of course, were uninformed. They took them to be bone, on account, obviously, of their hardness, and probably also of their white appearance, and because they were found to remain in the skull after every vestige of other tissue had disappeared. As a matter of fact, they ‘resemble compact bone in appearance and in composition’,¹ yet in reality they are more closely allied to the hair. For both are modifications of a papilla of the outer integument of the body. The tooth, ‘though intimately connected with the bony skeleton, is really a calcified papilla of the mucous membrane.’¹