plants. In Sushruta are recorded the properties and uses of some 700 of them; but all of these were not indigenous to India. Some foreign drugs were imported into this country. In ancient times there was a trade in drugs between the Hindoos and other nations. Liquorice, which does not grow in this country, was extensively used in Hindoo Medicine. It grows in Asia Minor and Central Asia, and was brought to this country by the nomadic tribes of Central Asia. We find mention of it in Charaka and Sushruta. The majority, however, of the medicinal plants in these works were indigenous to this country. Their properties were known by empirical means. Information regarding them was gathered from hunters and shepherds. For this purpose, physicians were enjoined to penetrate forests and climb mountains.
The works of Charaka and Sushruta appear to have been composed in the pre-Buddhist period. The rise of Buddhism gave an impetus to the study of medicine in ancient India. The edicts of Asoka provided the establishment of hospitals at all principal towns and cities of India for the sick and the wounded. The Buddhist missionaries penetrating the dreary wilderness of Siberia and Central Asia preaching the tenets of benevolence and humanity to the savage tribes, also attended to treating the sick and the wounded. They were in one sense medical missionaries. The teachings of the Hindoo system of medicine were also spread to the countries which adopted Buddhism. The Buddhist missionaries brought with them drugs of other nations to India, and thus enriched the materia medica of Hindoo physicians.
The Greek invasion was not without influence on the medical practice of ancient India. The savants who accompanied the army of Alexander learnt much of the metaphysical, philosophical, and medical systems from the Hindoos. The successors of Alexander brought Greece and India into closer contact. Commerce was established between the two countries. It was thus that a large number of drugs of Central Asia and Asia Minor found their way to India. Greek physicians also came to know several medicinal plants of this country. As the Greeks
