Suśruta
A figure from the books
#Sushruta
Suśruta · trad. c. 6th century BCE
In the books · 1 chapter
Who this is
Surgery and medicine — śalya-tantra, the "science of extracting what has entered the body," the surgical branch of Āyurveda.
“An operation first written down in ancient Kāśī, kept alive for centuries in the hands of hereditary craftsman families, was performed on a mutilated bullock-driver at Poona in 1793, reported in a London magazine in 1794, repeated by a London surgeon in 1814 — and entered modern medicine under the name it still carries in the textbooks: the Indian method.”
The big idea, in the book's words:
“Surgery can be taught. Before a student ever touched a patient he practised his cuts on melons and gourds, his probing on worm-eaten wood, his bandaging on a stuffed doll — and among the operations he learned was the rebuilding of a severed nose with a living flap of the patient's own skin, the founding operation of what the world now calls plastic surgery.”
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