Abstract
SOME time ago, when Dr. Hoernle was preparing an edition of two old Indian medical, tracts, preserved in the Bower manuscript of the fifth century A.D., he was surprised to find how little we knew of medicine as taught and practised in Ancient India. The volume under review is the first fruit of a resolve to make good that deficiency in the history of medicine so far as it can now be made good by a study of existing manuscripts and documents. Of the three systems of medicine which have come down to us the most ancient is that ascribed to Atreya, a physician who is assigned by Dr. Hoernle to the sixth century B.C.; the system ascribed to Susruta, the surgeon, is nearly as ancient; the third system, that of Vagbhata, the Galen of the mediaeval East, as Dr. Hoernle describes him, dates from the seventh century A.D., and is a compound of the two older systems.
Studies in the Medicine of Ancient India.
Part i., Osteology, or the Bones of the Human Body. By Dr. A. F. Rudolf Hoernle. Pp. xii + 252. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907.) Price 10s. 6d.
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Studies in the Medicine of Ancient India . Nature 77, 533 (1908). https://doi.org/10.1038/077533b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/077533b0