The Textual and Cultural History of Medicine in South Asia based on Newly-Discovered Manuscript Evidence

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Wujastyk, Dominik

• SSHRC Awarded IG 2020: The Compendium of Sushruta (Sushrutasamhita) is an ancient Indian medical text that was was used to diagnose and treat patients in South Asia two thousand years ago and continues to influence the study of medicine even today. The Compendium of Sushruta presents baffling linguistic, syntactic and semantic difficulties because of its complicated and flawed history of transmission and scribal corruption. The present project will undertake detailed work reading and transcribing a newly-discovered manuscript of the text dating back to 878 CE along with three related early manuscripts of the same text, evaluating their relationships and translating their content. The newly-discovered manuscript of The Compendium of Sushruta will be put into historical relationship with each other and with previously-known manuscripts using traditional historical and philological methods coupled with the methods of computerized cladistic analysis. The goal is to develop a fresh understanding of ancient South Asian medicine based on the new evidence. We will be especially focused on highlighting the textual and doctrinal differences between The Compendium as it existed in 878 CE and its received versions today.

• Date created

  2019-10-14

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Sanskrit
  • Nepal
  • Tenth Century
  • Arts and Culture
  • Print Culture
  • History of South Asia
  • 200 BC - 1000 AD
  • Codicology
  • Indology
  • Literary History
  • Book History
  • India
  • South Asia
  • Translation Studies
  • 2019
  • Medical History
  • Manuscripts
  • Cultural History
  • IG
  • South Asian History
  • Health
  • Insight Grant
  • Successful SSHRC
  • Asia
  • History of Medicine

• Type of Item

  Research Material

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-mddj-np53

• License

  Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International