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Sushruta Samhita
The Sushruta Samhita is an ancient Sanskrit text on medicine and surgery, and one of the most important such treatises on this subject to survive from the ancient world.
The Suśrutasaṃhitā is of great historical importance because it includes historically unique chapters describing surgical training, instruments and procedures.
Contents
About
Suśruta (Devanagari सुश्रुत, an adjective meaning "renowned") is named in the text as the author, who presented the teaching of his guru, Divodāsa. He is said in ancient texts such as the Buddhist Jatakas to have been a physician who taught in a school in Kashi (Varanasi) in parallel to another medical school in Taxila (on Jhelum river), sometime between 1200 BC and 600 BC. One of the earliest known mentions of the name Sushruta is in the Bower Manuscript (4th or 5th century), where Sushruta is listed as one of the ten sages residing in the Himalayas.
Rao in 1985 suggested that the author of the original "layer" was "elder Sushruta" (Vrddha Sushruta). The text, states Rao, was redacted centuries later "by another Sushruta, then by Nagarjuna, and thereafter Uttara-tantra was added as a supplement. It is generally accepted by scholars that there were several ancient authors called "Suśruta" who contributed to this text.
Period
The early scholar Rudolf Hoernle proposed that given that the author of Satapatha Brahmana – an ancient Vedic text, was aware of Sushruta doctrines, those Sushruta doctrines should be dated based on the composition date of Satapatha Brahmana. The composition date of the Brahmana is itself unclear, added Hoernle, and he estimated it to be about the sixth century BCE. While Loukas et al. date the text to mid 1st-millennium BCE, Boslaugh dates the currently existing text to the 6th-century CE.
Chapters
- Illnesses
- Medicinal plants
- Preparations from mineral sources
- Preparations based on animal sources
