1. Introduction

2. Who Was Sushruta?

3. What Did Sushruta Do?

4. What type of surgeries did Sushruta did?

5. Early diagnosis of variour illnesses.

6. Teachings and Learnings.

7. Why Is Sushruta Called “The Father of Surgery”?

8. Sushruta’s Legacy

9. FAQs

Imagine living in a world with no hospitals, no painkillers, and almost no one who understands how the human body works. Now, meet Sushruta, a super smart doctor from ancient India, who lived around 600 BCE, which was over 2,600 years ago. He is called the “Father of Surgery” and “Father of Plastic Surgery” because he did things most people wouldn’t believe possible for his time.

Sushruta was an ancient Indian physician and teacher. Think of him as an early kind of doctor, always curious about health, sickness, and what makes human beings tick. He loved helping people, but he also wanted to learn why things worked the way they did.

Sushruta wrote a huge medical book called the Sushruta Samhita. This ancient text (a bit like a super-old science textbook) is packed with information on surgery, healing, and even how to keep your body healthy. He described more than 1,120 different diseases and hundreds of plants used as medicine.

Some of his greatest inventions and discoveries are:

• First Plastic Surgery: Sushruta was the first person to do something called rhinoplasty—that’s a surgery to fix or rebuild someone’s nose. In his time, people’s noses were sometimes cut off as punishment, so Sushruta invented clever ways to make new ones using skin from their cheeks or foreheads!
• Anesthesia Pioneer: Surgery sounds scary without painkillers, right? Sushruta was among the first to suggest using things like wine, cannabis incense, and special herbs to help patients fall asleep or feel less pain during surgery. It wasn’t perfect, but it was way ahead of his time.
• Clean Surgery: Before most doctors even thought about germs, Sushruta made sure everything was clean during operations. He believed in washing hands and keeping tools and wounds as clean as possible—an idea that became super important later, in modern medicine.

He taught students to stitch wounds, fix broken bones, remove bladder stones, and even help women give birth safely. He described tools made of iron, bronze, and other metals. Some of these tools looked like tweezers, scalpels, and needles that doctors use now.

Long before fancy machines and lab tests, Sushruta figured out clever ways to tell what made someone sick.

For example:

• He guessed that malaria was caused by mosquitoes (hundreds of years before the rest of the world knew).
• To check for diabetes, he would even taste a patient’s urine. He noticed it was sweet like honey, which helped with the diagnosis and described it as “madhumeha” (honey-like urine)

Sushruta wasn’t just a doctor, but he was also a teacher. He believed that every good surgeon should care about their patients and treat them kindly.

He asked his students to learn to do the surgery through practice on fruits, vegetables, or even animal skins before trying on real people.

He also advised his students to pay close attention to everything about the patient, not only the sickness but also their feelings and fears.

Sushruta is called “The Father of Surgery” because he invented and recorded so many surgeries and ways of healing. Through these records, even thousands of years later, doctors around the world learned from him. By the 18th century, surgeons in Europe started copying some of Sushruta’s methods, especially in plastic surgery.

He set the foundation for safe, kind, and clever surgery, the way modern doctors try to help people today.

Sushruta’s writings are still studied by doctors and historians who want to know how medicine began. Many hospitals and medical colleges in India and around the world honor him by name.

Even though Sushruta lived so long ago, his spirit of curiosity, compassion, and invention continues to inspire new generations of doctors and scientists.