5th. Toxicology (Kalpa Sthána). The means of distinguishing poisoned food, and descriptions of different mineral, vegetable, and animal poisons, with their antidotes, is given under this head. This division is treated of in eight chapters.
6th. The supplementary section, Locales (Uttara Sthána), includes various local diseases; as those of the eye, nose, ears and head, with their treatment; the symptoms and treatment of fever, and its varieties; dysentery, consumption; _gulma_; diseases of the heart; jaundice; discharges of blood, and fainting. This is followed by the treatment of intoxication, of cough, hiccough, asthma, hoarseness of voice, worms, stercoraceous vomiting, cholera, dyspepsia, and dysuria. It also treats of madness, epilepsy, apoplexy; the different tastes of substances, with their effects; the means of retaining health, and the different opinions of practitioners regarding the humours. These subjects are treated in sixty-six chapters.
According to Susruta a pupil had to be initiated into the Science of Medicine. “A medical man should initiate a pupil who is either a Brahmana, Kshatriya, or Vaishya, the members of whose body are sound, of an amiable disposition, active, well-conducted, mild, healthy, vigorous, talented, courageous, of a retentive memory, good judgment and rank, whose tooth-ends, tongue, and lips are small, whose eyes, nose, and mouth are straight, of a pleasant mind, talk, and behaviour, and able to bear fatigue; other such should not be initiated.”
Many ceremonies follow; an altar is to be erected having four angles in some conspicuous direction, which is to be washed with infusion of cow-dung and spread with kúsa grass; precious stones and rice are to be scattered upon it, and a fire is to be kindled with a number of precious woods, an oblation of ghee is to be made, and the mystic words Bhúr Bhuvah Svar and Om are to be said. “After this hail each divinity (Brahma, Agni, Dhanvantari, Prajápati, Asvins, and Indra) and each Sage (the Rishis), and make the pupil do the same.”
Stenzler and others have thought it possible that Susruta borrowed his system of medicine largely from the Greeks, and they say that so far as chronology is affected by it there would be nothing surprising in the circumstance. But Weber asserts[247] that no grounds whatever exist for this supposition; on the contrary, there is much to tell against such an idea. None of the contemporaries of Susruta has a name with a foreign sound, and the cultivation of medicine is assigned by Susruta and other writers to the city of Benares. The weights and measures to be employed by the physician are those of the eastern provinces, which never came into close contact with the Greeks, and it was first in these parts where medicine received its special cultivation.