The Academy of Yoga and Oriental Studies (AYOS) organised a lecture on ‘Dhanvantari’ — the founder of Indian medical system’ here last week with AYOS Director Dr Indulata Das as the speaker.
Dr Das said India is the cradle of all branches of knowledge from where it spread all across the globe. When the world was steeped in darkness of utter savagery, India had reached the renaissance of knowledge scaling the quintessential heights of glory. Almost all seminal minds, great thinkers, physicians having eternal credibility were born in this land, she opined.
“The reality now is astonishingly shocking! It’s an irony that we Indians are made to learn about any branch of knowledge with the name of a foreigner as its exponent,” she lamented.
Medical science is one such known branch of knowledge. The Indian medical system, meaningfully known as Ayurveda or the knowledge of longevity, is the world’s oldest system. Dhanvantari, the king of Kashi, the human incarnation of God Dhanvantari, is revered as the founder of it. The division of Ayurveda into eight branches is also attributed to him. Divodasa Dhanvantari, the great grandson of the first Dhanvantari, is respected as the greatest propounder of surgery, Dr Das said.
She said India is a country where plastic surgery (like restoration of severed body parts) was being practised as a very common treatment. In the year 1772, it was observed by a British doctor who published the fact in the Madras Gazette. It was published in the Gentlemen’s Magazine later. The British came to India to study the fact and took 20 long years to learn it.
later on in 1815, the first plastic surgery was done in England. But nowhere in the history of surgery, the name of India finds a place it deserves. Even Indians do not know that the concept of plastic surgery passed on to the West from India. “Slavery of one thousand years has killed our self assertion. We are haunted by a sense of inferiority complex,” she observed. “Time has come when contributions of our forefathers must come to light, which the world deserves to know,” she added. There was a question-answer session after the lecture in which many scholars participated.
In his presidential address, Mahamedhananda Saraswati said there are many other great personalities who have made remarkable contributions to the field of Indian medical science and serious studies must be made into them.
Prominent among the others present were noted Sanskrit scholars S Sundarrajan, Prof VB Shastri, Taradatt and Mihir Mishra. They all Dr Indulata Das to write an authenticated biography on Bhagwan Dhanvantari so as to enable generations to be well aware of such a divine physician who was an Indian.