- Lived:
- unknowable — tradition places him in Kāśī (Varanasi) around the 6th century BCE, a pupil of the king-physician Divodāsa Dhanvantari; the Suśruta Saṃhitā, the surgical compendium carrying his name, was compiled in layers between the last centuries BCE and roughly 500 CE
- Field:
- surgery and medicine — śalya-tantra, the "science of extracting what has entered the body," the surgical branch of Āyurveda
- The Big Idea:
- Surgery can be taught. Before a student ever touched a patient he practised his cuts on melons and gourds, his probing on worm-eaten wood, his bandaging on a stuffed doll — and among the operations he learned was the rebuilding of a severed nose with a living flap of the patient's own skin, the founding operation of what the world now calls plastic surgery.
- In their words:
- "The portion of the nose to be covered should be first measured with a leaf. Then a piece of skin of the required size should be dissected from the living skin of the cheek, and turned back to cover the nose, keeping a small pedicle attached to the cheek." (Suśruta Saṃhitā, tr. after Kunjalal Bhishagratna, 1907–16)
- If you remember one thing:
- An operation first written down in ancient Kāśī, kept alive for centuries in the hands of hereditary craftsman families, was performed on a mutilated bullock-driver at Poona in 1793, reported in a London magazine in 1794, repeated by a London surgeon in 1814 — and entered modern medicine under the name it still carries in the textbooks: the Indian method.