The student of surgery had many curious contrivances for acquiring manual dexterity. He practised the art of making incisions on wax spread out on a board; on flowers, bulbs, and gourds. Skins or bladders filled with paste and mire were used for the same purpose. He practised scarification on the fresh hides of animals from which the hair has not been removed; puncturing, or lancing the vessels of dead animals; extraction on the cavities of the same, or fruits with large seeds; sutures were made on skin and leather, and ligatures and bandages on well-made models of the human limbs. Fourteen kinds of bandages are described by Vágbhatta. The cautery was applied by hot seeds, burning substances, or heated plates and probes. Frequently this treatment was used for headaches and for liver and spleen disorders. It was chiefly employed, however, as with the Greeks, for averting bleeding by searing the mouths of the divided vessels. The early Hindus could extract stone from the bladder, and even the fœtus from the uterus. They must have been bold operators, many of their operations being actually hazardous. It is a subject deserving of inquiry how they lost the information and skill which they once possessed in so high a degree. The books of medicine and surgery to which reference has been made are undoubtedly most ancient, and it must be remembered were considered as inspired writings. Professor Wilson says: “We must infer that the existing sentiments of the Hindus are of modern date, growing out of an altered state of society, and unsupported by their oldest and most authentic civil and moral, as well as medical institutes.”
Many surgical operations which we consider triumphs of our modern practice were invented by the ancient Hindus. They were skilled in amputation, in lithotomy (as we have seen), in abdominal and uterine operations; they operated for hernia, fistula, and piles, set broken bones, and had specialists in rhinoplasty or operations for restoring lost ears and noses. It was a common custom in India for a jealous husband to mutilate the nose of his suspected wife, so that surgeons had opportunities to practise this branch of their art. The ancient Indian surgeons invented an operation for neuralgia which was very similar to the modern division of the fifth nerve above the eyebrow. Veterinary science was understood, and ancient treatises exist, says Hunter,[275] on the diseases of elephants and horses.
The best era of Hindu medicine was from 250 B.C. to 750 A.D. Its chief centres were found in such Buddhist monastic universities as that of Nalanda, near Gayá.[276] Hunter thinks it probable that the ancient Brahmans may have derived their anatomical knowledge from the dissection of the sacrifices; but there is no doubt that the true schools of Indian medicine were the great public hospitals which were established by Buddhist princes like Asoka, famous for his rock edicts, B.C. 251-249. Amongst the fourteen injunctions inscribed by this enlightened sovereign, the first was the prohibition of the slaughter of animals for food or sacrifice, and the second was the provision of a system of medical aid for men and animals and of plantations and wells on the roadside.[277]
Probably King Asoka’s were the first real hospitals for general diseases anywhere established, as the institutions connected with the Greek temples were not exactly hospitals in our sense of the term; they were more like camps round a mineral spring or spa. The Buddhist physicians would have in these merciful institutions abundant opportunity for the continuous study of disease.
Whatever may have been the condition of ancient Hindu anatomy and surgery, in modern times both have now fallen to the lowest point. Dislocated joints are replaced and fractured limbs set by a class of men similar to our bone-setters which are found in all nations. Certain of the Mohammedan doctors—Hakeems—sometimes bleed and couch for cataract in a clumsy manner. The village Kabiráj knows but a few sentences of Sanskrit texts, but he has “a by no means contemptible pharmacopœia,” says Hunter. The rest consists of spells, fasts, and quackery.
Physicians (Vitians or Vydias) being Sudras are not allowed to read the sacred medical writings (Vedas); these are guarded with religious awe by the Brahmins; they are permitted, however, access to certain commentaries upon the professional sacred books.
When we reflect on the high position which the science and art of the Hindus had attained in very ancient times, it is surprising that we have apparently learned little or nothing from them in connection with the healing art. Max Müller believes that there was an ancient indigenous Hindu astronomy and an ancient indigenous Hindu geometry. Probably the first attempt at solving the problem of the squaring of the circle was suggested, he thinks, by the problem in the Sutras how to construct a square altar that should be of exactly the same magnitude as a round altar. It is scarcely conceivable that so patient and shrewd a people as the Hindus, a people at once so observant and so profoundly speculative, should not have kept pace with the other enlightened nations of the world in the study of medicine and surgery. The vegetation of India is so rich in medicinal herbs that its Materia Medica could hardly be equalled in any other country; so that both by intellect and by location the Hindus should be amongst the foremost professors of the art of medicine. On the contrary, however, the West has everywhere to instruct the East in the medical sciences; and the young Brahmins who flock to the medical schools and universities of Europe find that they have everything to learn from us in this direction. Is this an evidence of arrested development, a retrogression in civilization due to conservatism and a paralysis of the power to keep pace with the world’s advance consequent on the influences of religion and custom? Probably it is. All the medicine of the Hindus is empiricism; their systems exclude anatomy and surgery, without which, as Prof. H. H. Wilson observes,[278] “the whole system must be defective.... We can easily imagine that these were not likely to have been much cultivated in Hindustan, and that local disadvantages and religious prejudices might have proved very serious impediments to their acquirement.”
As compared with other ancient nations, Egypt, Chaldæa, Greece, and Rome, we are at considerable disadvantage in the attempt to discover what was known and practised of the healing arts in the remoter ages. We have no papyri like the “Book of the Dead” or the great medical papyrus of Ebers; we have no inscriptions on such ancient monuments as Mesopotamia has preserved for us; we have no Sanskrit treatises to be compared for their antiquity and scientific interest with those which have come down to us from ancient Greece.
Max Müller says[279] that “few Sanskrit MSS. in India are older than 1000 after Christ, nor is there any evidence that the art of writing was known in India much before the beginning of Buddhism, or the very end of the ancient Vedic literature.”
Then, again, the Hindu treatises on medical subjects, whether fables or facts, have hitherto been little noticed by Sanskrit scholars.[280]