Sushruta

That's interesting.

See, Sushruta Samhita, you know, Sushruta is considered the forefather of modern surgery.

And Sushruta Samhita was written 3000 years ago.

I think it's about second century AD, around between second century.

And there, if you really look at Sushruta, That is what is called prasuti, which is about obstetrics.

Sushruta says that, you know, until when you can wait for natural birthing and if not, you need to use instruments.

And he had developed instruments for birthing.

So Ayurveda does not have that romantic feeling that A lot of new age people are saying that, OK, it is all about natural.

Also, as Balbhardi has stated that these changes are in line with the National Education Policy 2020 recommendations, which, as I already said, has greater emphasis on Indian knowledge system.

Pallavi also tells us that in history, Sushruta, described as the father of surgery, now gets a detailed account of his medical contributions, including techniques for reconstructing the nose.

Chanakya, who previously received only a brief mention, has an expanded section covering the Arthashastra, governance, taxation, defence and his role in Chandragupta Maurya's rise.

But it is these changes to the history textbook that raise a different set of questions.

Inside the human body, a similar process runs many times faster.

measured in months and years rather than millennia but the essence is identical minerals settle cling stack up and harden a kidney stone in the end is a miniature stalactite column lying in the wrong place built by the body itself from the very substances the body produces every day and this is not a disease of the modern age kidney stones are among the oldest diseases humanity has ever recorded so all that they were present before humans knew how to write the most persuasive evidence sits in museums ancient egyptian mummies thousands of years old when x-rayed show small white shadows in the pelvis right where the renal pelvis and ureters should be the ancient egyptians the builders of pyramids from million-ton blocks of stone carried inside their bodies tiny stones their bodies could not pass the hippocratic corpus describes stone disease and hippocrates himself advised physicians of his time not to attempt stone removal because surgery in antiquity was so crude that death was nearly more certain than the stone itself in the east ancient healers diagnosed stones by the signs of difficult urination and urine sedimenting like washed rice treating them with herbal diuretics in ancient india the healer sushruta described the technique of cutting open the bladder to retrieve a stone through the floor of the pelvis an operation that still sends a shiver down the spine when read today.

Thousands of years later, when anesthesia and antibiotics arrived, stone removal finally ceased to be a gamble with death.

The most thought-provoking lesson from that history is this, for thousands of years, humanity never lacked the pain, only the means.

So are you familiar with this? So it's one of the three great, it's one of the three great texts.

It's Sushruta.

So

anyway,

So I bought Charaka three years ago and then I had been dragging my feet about getting the Ashtanga Hridyam and this one because they had to come from India.

But get this.

Sushruta, son of Saeed Vishwamitra, is said to be the author of this treatise.

It embodies the teaching of his preceptor.

There's many ways to frame it, but it's all kind of the same thing.

And you look at, okay, where's the first diagnosis of diabetes, for example, in history? And you go back to this ancient Indian doctor called Sushruta.

There's some debate about when exactly he lived, but somewhere between the 3rd century BCE and the 3rd century CE.

So roughly 2,000 years ago.

Imagine, if you will, a world where healing and stargazing were not separate pursuits, but part of one great tapestry of understanding, woven by scholars who believed that the cosmos and the human form share deep and mysterious connections.

Long before the Gupta Golden Age began to shine, the foundations of Indian medicine had already been laid by a physician named Sushruta, whose work, though compiled perhaps centuries earlier, continued to guide healers throughout this flourishing era.

The Sushruta Samhita, a remarkable text attributed to him, reads today like a window into an astonishingly sophisticated medical tradition.

Within its pages, we find detailed descriptions of surgical procedures, the classification of different types of wounds, and careful instructions for preparing instruments with cleanliness in mind.

Long before the modern understanding of infection existed, Sushruta described techniques for reconstructive procedures, and physicians trained in his tradition learned to work with remarkable precision and care for their patients.

Picture a quiet training ground somewhere in ancient India, where students gathered around their teacher, perhaps near the banks of a slow-moving river, practicing their delicate skills not on living patients, but on fought fruits, on the stems of plants.

or even on the hides of animals, patiently developing the steady hands they would one day need.

Likely, as with most historical transformations, it was not any single cause but several forces converging together, much as different streams merge to form a river's changing course.