Ayurveda
: Ancient Heritage in the Age of Globalisation
49
trephining in ancient Indian skeleton remains. Major
works in this direction has been done by Luckacs, Mishra
and Kennedy (1982), Kennedy and Malhotra (1966), and
Dutta (1981). Though not directly related to health and
medicine, several other studies on ancient human remains
from ancient India have been found useful in profiling
such issues like male-female ratio in the successive
periods (for example see, Enrhardt and Kennedy 1965)
and estimating the typological diversity in ancient
population (see Luckacs and Walimbe 1986; Kennedy
1986; Kennedy and Possehl 1984, Gupta, Basu and Dutta
1970). Nevertheless, it must be stressed that studies in
ancient archaeology in India from health and medicine
perspectives are severally limited. In fact they fail to gain
even notice in carefully prepared reviews of recent
development in field of archaeology in India as a whole
(e.g. see Ratnagar 1995).
The modern notices on Ayurveda start appearing
from the early 19th century. Dr Ainslie, a surgeon in
Madras, published his
Materia Medica of Hindustan
in
1813. He was followed by Wise who produced a scientific
narrative on
Hindu System of Medicine
in 1845. These
works discuss the medicinal items, anatomy and
physiology of Ayurveda.
These early scholars were followed by the western
philologists interested in Sanskrit literature. Apart from
