Hindu Medicine c7.168

c7.168

There is nothing to indicate that surgery was relegated to an inferior place, though it had been handed down as a tradition separate from that of the science of longevity before Suśruta; the contrary is true. Besides, Suśruta’s classic innovation, enlivening traditionalism, spared India a dark age of surgery similar to that which prevailed in Western medicine when surgery, under the auspices of Galenism, fell into such neglect that surgeons were no longer ranked as physicians.