Medical education in ancient India.

Abstract

The article being submitted concerns medical education in the antiquity. A lot is known about how physicians were trained in ancient Greece. Most of us a familiar with Hippocrates and his contribution to Medicine. Relatively little is known about how physicians were trained in non-Western cultures. The author focuses on ancient India. Based on three extant medical texts the author reconstructs training of physicians in that epoch, and offers an account of the journey undertaken by students of medicine and their eventual role as physicians. This glance at how physicians were trained in these ancient times may be of interest to physicians, particularly to psychiatrists, at a time when we plan curriculum is response to rapid changes that are occurring in medicine. I hope that the readers will appreciate where and how the journey as physicians began and medical and psychiatry educators will glean from history a new perspective on how we train modern day physicians and psychiatrists.