The Founding Father of Surgery: Sushruta

 

The Founding Father of Surgery: Sushruta

Sushruta lived in India sometime between 600 to 1000 BC. His Sushruta Samhita is one of the most outstanding treatises in Indian medical literature, describes the ancient tradition of surgery in India.

He lived, taught and practiced in Varanasi, and is remembered especially for his innovative method of rhinoplasty.

Sushruta also commented on diabetes, referring to it as madhumeha; and is mentioned in ancient birch bark medical treatise Bower Manuscript discovered in China,dated around AD 450, and preserved in Bodleian Library in Oxford. He wrote that “any one wishing to acquire a thorough knowledge of anatomy, must prepare a dead body and carefully observe and examine all its parts”. As he wrote in Sanskrit, his text was only slowly disseminated to the west and other parts of the world. Around AD 360-350 the Buddhist scholar Vasubandhu revised and rewrote the original text in simplified language.

Sushruta developed surgical techniques for reconstructing noses, earlobes and genitalia. He developed the forehead flap rhinoplasty procedure that remains contemporary plastic surgical practice; also the otoplastic technique for reconstructing an earlobe with skin from the cheek. In Sushruta Samhita, he describes the free-graft rhinoplasty as follows:

Regarding anesthesia Sushruta wrote “Wine should be used before operation to produce insensibility to pain. The patient who has been fed, does not faint, and he who is rendered intoxicated, does not feel the pain of the operation.”

Sushruta is considered to be the first surgeon to have removed cataracts, describing varieties of cataracts along with the depression method of couching by the anterior root.

A.O. Whipple wrote “All in all Sushruta must be considered the greatest surgeon.” And in his short history of medicine Ackernecht he wrote ”There is little doubt that plastic surgery in Europe which flourished in medieval Italy is a direct descendant of classical Indian surgery.”

Information Source:

Satish Saroshe's article (Sushruta: the ancient Indian surgeon) in Hektoen International