The science of medicine

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Wujastyk, Dominik

• Introduction: Indian medicine, as a systematic and scholarly tradition, begins historically with the appearance of the great medical encyclopedias of Caraka, Su ́sruta and Bhela about two thousand years ago.1 These are the oldest Indian medical texts we have, and also the most influential. Just as Panini’s famous linguistic study of Sanskrit leaps into the historical record fully formed, like the Buddha from Queen Maya’s side, so the medical encyclopedias too emerge with a learned medical tradition in an almost fully articulated form.

• Date created

  2003

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Medical Philosophy
  • History Of Medicine
  • Classical Indian Medicine

• Type of Item

  Chapter

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-msbc-q769

• License

  © 2003 D. Wujastyk et al. This version of this article is open access and can be downloaded and shared. The original author(s) and source must be cited.