Vaddoara: The plastic surgeries of ear and nose was prevalent in India 2000 years ago, as per a book titled ‘On the Plastic Surgery of the Ears and Nose: The Nepalese Version of the Suśrutasaṃhitā’ recently published by Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing (HASP) based in Germany.

The book, authored by Dominik Wujastyk- a professor of Indian history at the University of Alberta- Canada, and eight others, throws light on the plastic surgery of ear and nose described in a thousand-year-old Nepalese Ayurvedic manuscript of Suśrutasaṃhitā. The book, authored by the scholars from across the world, including Dominik Wujastyk, Jason Birch, Andrey Klebanov, Harshal Bhatt, Vandana Lele, Madhusudan Rimal, Deepro Chakraborty, Paras Mehta and Madhu K. Parameswaran offers an edition, study and translation of the historically important chapter about the plastic surgery on the nose and ears of the manuscript. Two of the co-authors of the book, based from Vadodara, namely Harshal Bhatt (Assistant Professor at The department of Sanskrit at The MSU of Baroda) and Dr Vandana Lele (independent scholar) have contributed by transcribing the old Nepalese manuscript of Suśrutasaṃhitā.

The book states that the Suśrutasaṃhitā is a substantial treatise, written in the Sanskrit language, that presents a systematic, scholarly form of medicine for diagnosing and treating the many ailments that patients presented in South Asia two thousand years ago. The manuscript, originally written in Newari script, provides a description of how the plastic surgery of ear and nose was performed by the Ayurveda practitioners of ancient India. The surgery was practiced in India till around the 17th century, which was also witnessed by the Britishers at that time. DeshGujarat