Hindu Medicine c7.143

c7.143

This legendary setting, a familiar characteristic of Hindu traditional wisdom, is intended to afford to Suśruta’s compilation of medical knowledge a suitable background through stressing the authority of its antiquity and divine origin. Except for the final part, which was added still later, Suśruta’s compilation actually reached its present form in the fourth century A. D. But through the legendary framework it is presented as deriving directly from a mythical early period of the Vedic age, in which immortal sages and their sons were enabled through superior spiritual perfection to receive the revelations of the gods. Thus was man apprised of what he needs to know to preserve health and long life, in spite of the inevitable decline of his virtues with the gradual deterioration of the substance of the universe in the course of its four ages. The claim to the incontestable authority of age and origin provides no historical clue to the actual rise of classic medicine.