Page:The Surgical Instruments of the Hindus Vol 1.djvu/41

 THE Surgical Instruments of the Hindus

Chapter I.

Introduction.

Ancient Medical Authors and their works.

The Science and Art of medicine, like many different branches of learning originated with the Hindus. They consider the art of healing as an Upaveda and it is generally known as Ӓyurveda, that is the art of prolonging life. Like the Vedas, they trace the origin of the science to God, the fountain of all true knowledge. Bramhā transmitted this heaven-born science to this world for benefit of the mortals in one of the sacred writings, the Äyurveda.

It was composed as a sub-division of the Atharva Veda and consisted orginally of a läkh slokas or a hundred thousand stanzas, divided into a thousand chapters. Then considering the short span of life and inadequate intelligence of man, he divided the book into eight parts as follows:-