Mitra Desai

In the previous chapter, we read how Hoernle persevered for almost two decades and translated the Bower Manuscript. The original name of this scripture is “Naavnitakam” Naavanitakam is a collation of two manuscripts, a larger and a smaller one. The larger manuscript was itself a compilation of six smaller manuscripts.

Look at the accompanying photo. Don’t they look like twins? Not quite twins, but they were maternal cousins as well as the heads of two of the most powerful empires of the 19th century. On the left is Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, and on the right is King

Our search for Sushruta has so far thrown up several pointer that he was the Father of Surgery, but we still haven’t found the man himself. So how do we find him — why, through the most important marker ofcourse, the Sushruta Samhita. The Samhita that we know today is

Search for an image of Sushruta and below is the image you will find… with a variety of captions, ‘Sushruta — Father of Surgery’, ‘Sushruta performing eye surgery’ etc; A bearded man deeply engrossed in some surgical procedure. He is dressed in a simple white dhoti and two similarly dressed assistants

In the first part, we saw that the letter published in the October 1794 edition of The Gentleman’s Magazine (TMG), by a certain “B.L.” who described “a very curious chirurgical procedure” of “affixing a new nose on a man’s face” that was unknown to the Europeans but