FEOM THE PEEFACE 



Probably it will come as a surprise to many^ as it did to 

 myself, to discover the amount of anatomical knowledge which 

 is disclosed in the works of the earliest medical writers of India. 

 Its extent and accuracy are surprising, when we allow for 

 their early age — probably the sixth century before Christ 

 and their peculiar methods of definition. In these circum- 

 stances the interesting question of the relation of the Medicine 

 of the Indians to that of the Greeks naturally suggests itself. 



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The possibilityj at leasts of a dependence of either on the 

 other cannot well be denied, when we know as an historical 

 fact that two Greek physicians, Ktesias, about 400 b. c, and 

 Megasthenes about 300 B.C., visited, or resided in, Northern 



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India, 



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No satisfactory knowledge of human anatomy can be 

 attained without recourse to human dissection. Of the 



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practice of such dissection in ancient India we have direct 

 proof in the medical compendium of Susruta, and it is 

 indirectly con&med by the statements of Charaka. . . • • 

 As to the Greeks there is indubitable evidence that an 

 extensive practice of human dissection, on dead, and even 

 on living subjects, prevailed in the Alexandrian schools of 

 Herophilos and Erasistratos in the earlier pai't of the third 

 century e.g. But their knowledge of anatomy appears in 



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some particulars, such as the nervous and vascular systems, so 

 much in advance of that of the early Indians, that, if there 

 was any borrowing on the part of the latter from the Greeks, 

 it must have taken place at a very much earlier period, in the 

 time of Hippokrates and his immediate followers— that is to 

 say, in the second half of the fifth century B.C. 



My thanks are due to the authorities of the India Office 

 for their liberality in granting a subvention towards the 

 cost of publication. 



