Pratyaksha-Shārīram : a textbook of human anatomy in Sanskrit with an English and a Sanskrit introduction, containing a short history of Ayurvedic literature / by Gananath Sen.

  • Sena, Gaṇanātha, 1877-1945.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Pratyaksha-Shārīram : a textbook of human anatomy in Sanskrit with an English and a Sanskrit introduction, containing a short history of Ayurvedic literature / by Gananath Sen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    12/280 (page 6)
    India's ancient glory yet survives in part. A bird’s-eye- view of the last two thousand years. eivilzation to India,—her very mythology and old names are from Sanskrit literature. The civilization of Koine was a product of later age and both Greece and Rome owed a great deal to the Buddhist prea- chers, sent out by Asoka and other Buddhist princes. The dress f.nd manners of ancient Rome closely resembled those of ancient India. Arabian civilization came much later and Arab historians(iacknowledge in plain terms the great in- tellectual debt they owed to India. But while Egypt survives only in her mummies and pyramids, the ancient glories of Greece and Rome have been nearly effaced under the Huna invasions. If the other half of Europe, now the great nation-builders and educators of the world, had not come to their res- cue, old Greece and Rome would have been now nearly forgotten. But a part of the ancient glory of India still survives—notwithstanding greater crushing influences in the past—in the modest ham- lets of the simple pandits. Hindu Medicine at least still holds its own to no mean extent against all foreign rivals. Intrinsic merit based on solid clinical foundations can not be denied by thought- ful men to such an exponent of ancient glory,—what- ever its shortcomings at the present day. Ever since the invasions of the Greeks (327 B.C.), India had so many vicissitudes of fortune that one who arrays the facts of history^^ before the mind’s eye can hardly wonder how so much of the past glory was lost. The real wonder is —how so much has yet survived. After the great invasions of (17) Vide Dr. P. C. Roy’s Hisi>ory of Hindu Chemistry o\. I.Ch. VI, in which the subject has been elaborately discussed. (18) Almost all Histories of India are unanimous on these facts,