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limit of childhood he takes to be thirty years—quite in keeping with the conception of the heroic age.
It should, however, be borne in mind that the Charaka, as we now possess it, can by no means lay claim to be the first comprehensive and systematic treatise on Hindu medicine, it represents rather a more or less final development of the subject, just as the elaborate grammar of Pánini is based upon some twenty previous works of his predecessors, notably of Yáska, Sákalya, Sákatáyana, Gárgya and others.
The above has its parallel in the history of Greek medicine anterior to the time of Hippocrates. As Draper observes:
Writings of Hippocrates."Of the works attributed to Hippocrates, many are doubtless the production of his family, his descendants, or his pupils. The inducements to literary forgery in the times of the Ptolemies, who paid very high prices
hundred and sixty bones" (XCVI. 55). This has been adduced by Jolly as a "reason in favour of the high antiquity of its laws." Vide Intro. to Vishnu, pp. XVIII-XX. See also Jolly's "Medicine" (Grundriss), p. 42.
